City & Guilds School Degree Show BA Fine Art - 2008

The independent City & Guilds art school is small with around two hundred students. They charged fees long before all the other institutions, but some funding comes from City of London livery companies including the Fishmongers'! There is a very high staff-to-student ratio and classes are small, other courses on offer, unusually, are Conservation, Wood and Stone Carving.

There is a traditional feel to this institution with skilled painting and drawing from a majority of the students ranging from the meditative, serene blue paintings of Icelandic Maria K Steinsson to the obsessive and meticulous drawings by Takayuki Hara of cute boys and pornographic games that remind me of the outsider artist Henry Darger.

Sean O’Brien’s work stood out for its unusual subject matter, huge paintings of kitchen gas burners that accorded an importance usually given to flowers in art, they are in fact like massive blue sunflowers. Notable for the installation in particular was a dark space with ultraviolet light filled with the works of Malgosia Stepnik. The canvasses are packed with multicoloured corals and jellyfish and the environment compliments this as it is evocative of being underwater.

There isn’t very much sculpture, but the large room filled with pieces by Kate Britton makes up for this with quality. She uses humble material like steel, wire wool and PVA glue in her work but the end results are stunning - large 3d drawings - simple but very satisfying. With a more twenty first century, junk aesthetic, the hard to access room filled by Catalina Torres with surreal juxtapositions of object trouve is a bit disappointing. Individually some of the pieces are interesting but they don’t seem to create the right effect together, perhaps they are too formally arranged and spaced. Finally, showing humour as well as exceptional sympathy for materials, a surreal ‘cartoon’ sculpture by Emma Simpson. This is a ‘Pelham puppet’ of a broom, and she has transformed this useful object into a useless but stunning piece of art.