Slade MA / MFA Degree show 2008

It was tough seeing the Slade MA show immediately after the Royal College’s slick production, my initial reaction was that the results were less professional and poorer for it. On reflection and after talking to a couple of the students I have revised my opinion considerably.

The approach is more experimental and the presentation is less resolved and polished. They are not intent on ‘finishing’ students here but aim to keep on developing them. If the different ethos leads to Slade students being unable to analyze and focus then maybe is a bit suspect but as all the best creative processes are iterative those skills will be being learned throughout the course. The degree show date is fixed, and the work doesn’t stop there, but keeps going through the cycles of research and refinement and these students are being encouraged to push it as far as they can. Graduates of this program will be prepared to thrive in a variety of public and private roles and not just focussed on the commercial world, so this course leads to work that is not necessarily ‘art fair ready’ but very individual. The only overtly derivative work in my opinion was that of Akiko Ban whose pile of saggy breasts in particular was pure Louise Bourgeois.

There is a noticeable trend to making very large 3d ‘colour installations’ coming almost exclusively out of the painting department. The students say that Bruce (Professor Bruce McLean, Head of Graduate Painting) encourages this experimental approach and ‘off the canvas’ painting. Laura Taylor presents us with more of a studio visit than an exhibition with a room full of painting robots. There are some working, but others are presumably relics of the previous experiments which we can watch on monitors within this junk filled room. The whole did somewhat resemble a Takahashi installation but much messier. A touch I particularly liked was that each viewer is involved in the performance as there are brushes attached to the door painting arcs every time it is opened.

An irregular blobby pink ball in courtyard did nothing to entice me but when I was downstairs in the underground gallery I found it could be viewed from below and in relation to a hanging mass of strips of yellow carpet and green acetate both of Sarah Bowker-Jones’s sculptures came alive. There were a few white installations too, a disturbing piece by Nalalie Gale included surreal components, a swan, pill box and antlers all white painted and smeared with extruded or excreted paint and hair. However the most eerily beautiful work was a white paper room by the Mexican Maria Fernando Barrero Ademe. Here the bed, cabinet, table, chair, lamps and plants were all made from white paper and all the room’s fittings, including the windows, were covered with paper giving a weird misty light.

If there is a humour prize for the show it would go to Mike Tuck who has apparently outsourced all his making to China, “Henry of Delft” shows the famous anthropomorphic vacuum cleaner in front of a wall of Dutch tiles. Even more impressive though, is his audacious inflatable observatory sitting next to the genuine one in the courtyard. It is made of black fabric and I have it on good authority that it cost £600 and they created it from photographs.