Central St Martins MA Degree Show 2008

More degree shows! After a summer break it feels good to be back to see the results of the last handful of MA courses. I have always wondered whether four term courses can compete at all with the two year ones offered by institutions including the RCA and Slade but this Central St Martins show had some exciting, strong work and my visit was enhanced by chatting to enthusiastic students about their practice.

Among the painters this year there are a few working on very small canvasses – notably Erin O’Connor whose “Boro Boro Christmas” has rich Gauguin colours and Dene Schuckit who paints lovely pictures with industrial subjects such as cranes. Also making the mundane extraordinary, is Andrew Hollis whose “Cityscape” contains blighted high rise flats painted beautifully. The featureless portraits of Lynol Lui might at first glance look like airbrush paintings but are hugely out of focus prints that intrigue and disturb.

The installation by Marco Cali feels much more like work in progress. It consists of an eyelevel city of food packaging, with delicate drawings of buildings and street furniture with a liberal scattering of small Kama Sutra illustrations. The potential for developing this and extending readings culturally and sociologically are huge and I really like the piece but I do feel the sex images could be dropped! There is a temptation to include everything in a degree show, to showcase all the work done during the course, but often it should be pared down to create a stronger piece. This also applies to the work of Iain Struth who displayed too many of his “Land Art” and “environmental” photos and crammed them into the space with some slightly contrived constructions including a broken upturned bath filled with wood, polyhedron sculptures and a bonsai tree!

Eugenia Emets presents a very polished 3D animation that produces a holographic illusion which combined with the sound and coloured light bathing the walls was both pleasing and a technical mystery. The contrast between this and Brian Rhodes’ seemingly simple films of rhythmically bouncing tennis balls at first seem huge however they are both hypnotic and absorbing.

I found a satisfying obsession with materials in the work of Rui Pignatelli, who has constructed scaffold poles from masking tape and the very beautiful knotted nets of Sarah Byrne but this is carried to extremes by Harry Burden who has literally been pissing on his art. Notably he uses two pence pieces, with varying patination of verdigris created with the urine, and creates Islamic looking plaques! His materials also include sugar and ground up coal (sprinkled onto screen prints). The wide range of themes which include images from banknotes and objects made of coins give another eclectic installation which includes a mirror ball and a lazar beam!

Rachel Overfield has a fascinating project, her drawings of animals, insects and skeletons, some behind glass in museum archive boxes, reference the museum collection in Brighton where she did much of the work. Replacing the originals with their representations deals well with our contemporary discomfort with zoological collections of the past. A film documenting her drawing a gorilla in London Zoo makes compulsive viewing, it poses for her on the other side of the glass and I’m not sure who is more interested in who. I was fascinated to find out that the zoo strongly discouraged her drawing, which to me appears very educative and in keeping with what I would imagine their mission to be. Finally I was amused by Elaine Tribley’s photographs of very professional signs proclaiming the imminent arrival of a “major artwork” and placed on waste land in a perfect echo of property developers.