Wimbledon BA Fine Art Degree Show – 2008

I started with the building containing sculpture, usually the best place to start, but wasn’t overly impressed with the offerings. Covering a car with makeup might be ambitious……. but why? The title of Elizabeth Denniss’s piece is “Not just a pretty face” and it is described as ‘46 bottles of foundation on a car’, so I’m not much wiser and the catalogue offers no real insights, just a car wheel similarly made up. Tim Foxon combines objects together in a very Richard Wentworth way, but again no hint of an explanation in the naming of these marriages and the only one to grab me, was the polar bear floating on a polystyrene burg in a fabulous large ceramic sink – a humorous way to turn the buildings fittings into part of his show. Another artist going for the one liner is Hannah Bender with “Skip on a Tyre” which does what is says on the tin as it is a one tonne skip, painted black, on a tyre!
The painting has more going for it – I particularly liked Colette Egan’s tiny black and white images in a series called “A tribute to everyday mysteries” which I assume are based on found photos. Also on the small side are some beautifully crafted, elongated images by Freya Wright, recipient of the Landmark Fine Art Prize. On a conceptual note, Anna Osbourne has poured paint down a photo of impasto paint, and then created an interesting paint puddle on the floor below.
Jane Williams has created a spoof exhibit with extraordinary objects from a fictional Leasingstede Museum and coincidentally, Jessica Wallis has come up with her own version of The Wallis Collection which includes a clever piece titled “Six years of collecting brass”. This comprises of a book documenting all the pieces with a description, weight and price where appropriate (e.g. Alligator bottle opener, 54 grams, £1), a photo of the collection, and the ingot made from melting them all down (which weighs 5004 grams and has a scrap valuation of £13).
Humour in very apparent in this cohort of students, and the ‘student party coffee table’ made out of Plasticine by Amber Abdellah was well crafted and fun despite (or because of) being pure Fischli & Weiss. More original, and fabulously silly, was a slap stick spoof consumer program “Bad Bag Packing” by duo Sean Mullins and Abigail Rowlings, although maybe it’s just mirroring to me my own ‘obsessive habits’ at the checkout and my dislike of cashiers shoving bleach and butter in the same bag and thinking that they’re being helpful!