Fine Art Degree Show UEL 2008

The Fine Art BA show at the University of East London’s Docklands Campus, located on the waterfront of the Royal Albert Dock was quite an experience, but with poor signage outside on the campus and inside the building it was an achievement to get to see the art!

The strongest work in the show for me was 3D, starting with a large outdoor piece shaped like a giant seedpod pulpit by James Armstrong, who says he “likes to work with mud”. He certainly had the weather on his side the day I visited, as I nearly slid down what should have been grass steps! Engaging the audience’s sense of smell is a work called Opulent Lemons by Rebecca Stow. These weirdly beautiful rotten fruit hung in a spiral chandelier reminded me of Anya Gallaccio’s because I could not stop Turner Prize apple tree, but the smell is a more unpleasant citrusy mold mixture.

Blending together masks, wigs and old furs into chimera, might seem fairly common in contemporary sculpture, but installation artist Adele Morse has taken things much further. In a shed, mocked up as a Taxidermy workshop, are books and tools of the trade as well as pickled animals. She has even taught herself the necessary skills and joined a Taxidermy Society! The ‘Doctor Moreau’ heads that adorn the shed are familiar medical experimentation fiction, the stuff of horror films.

Obsession with the morphing of species is a recurring theme in this show, from paintings of ‘pigeon mice’ by Hayley Page and Natalie Ellis’s ‘exquisite corpse’s’ typified by Crocodilus Simia. There is rather more narrative weight to the shamanic raven headed nude that obsesses Kate Wyatt. The laser cut plywood dreamcatchers throw interesting shadows and there is potential here, although I feel the shadows should be sharper.

I wasn’t excited by much of the painting – except that of Joseph Beaney who puts an energy and life into dull everyday things in his colourful square works, the mish mash of objects creates an almost abstract overall result.