Central St Martins BA Fine Art Degree show - 2008

Maybe I was tired or maybe it was tiring, but this year’s degree show at Central St Martins seemed rather lack lustre. Two things I’ve never seen before however were a fireman’s pole for the public to try (a DIY performance piece by Carol Jane Mancke) and a live dog with its own pound! The Isobel Shirley piece was called “Bear the Dog” and the catalogue shows an image of the dog wearing a corrugated cardboard mask. I guess there was some sort of performance – but as there was no evidence of it and the owner was too busy chatting to pet obsessed visitors I never got to find out.

Ellie Steel created an interesting piece by filling an extremely odd shaped space with an elastic 3d drawing, the internal camera was projected to viewers on the outside, but the intricate drawings on the walls didn’t connect for me. More up my street, Lottie Campbell had faithfully recreated a filthy squat room with the view from the window projected for extra realism. It was so dirty and trash filled I was somehow transported there. Another complete environment was red, fairly dark and filed with occult and tarot paraphernalia – this piece by Billie Temple had a film of what looked like offal and achieved the disturbing quality it was presumably looking for.

I didn’t find much new in the paintings at this year’s show, in fact there was a retro record cover feel to the glitter and gold images of Katie Tunn. and some of the work is reminiscent of Tania Kovats, but among the figurative painters there were one or two that stood out. For unusual subject material, the paintings of nurses doing everyday things by Paula Day. Of course Damien Hurst did produce paintings from the labour ward not so long ago! And for unusual medium, the combination of figurative painting and junk in works by Bronwen Tyrrell.

Charlotte Latcham has made pomanders of apples and pumpkins, they are a fabulous combination of the rotten fruit and the almost Faberge effect of the beads and pins, then she went and spoilt it by bringing in a tree that was so reminiscent of Anya Gallaccio’s as displayed in the Turner Prize exhibition.

There were a couple of fairly strong photography projects, for instance Luke Turner’s extremely low depth of field pieces, but I liked the content and presentation of Alastair T Willey’s phone box pictures in even more. The images were cleverly set out in the grid of a phone box’s windows.

Finishing on a humorous note I particularly enjoyed the way Anna Marie Kardos attached her copper pipe sculpture to the college plumbing and the project by Marianna Pulford and Rugina Mukid to wrap wool around four skylight stacks behind the main building.