Gifts for Her

Glasgow School of Art Degree Show 2008

Last month’s step by step show at Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone college was dominated by animals, with fur and feathers flying everywhere. Down in Glasgow, a edible number of this year’s Clique of Art graduates seem to have been contemplative with their stomachs, using edibles in sculptures, installations and performances.

One of the highlights of the show is Rose Hughes-Jones’s hanging sculpture, made from a impenetrable tangle of pyramid-shaped bags, impregnated with honey, which slowly drips on to the studio best, forming a mucilaginous little smooth. Off to the side, a perfectly regular pool of honey is bounded by a noose of fur. Besides being a beautiful, engrossed piece, it also makes use of the one atmosphere that artists scarcely ever seek to hire, smell - the fragrance is so thick you can almost taste it.

Thankfully, this is not yet the proves with the work of Gary Bolam. He has sewn strips of desiccated ham together and hung them over a vest-pocket plug-breach, presented the liver of an anonymous animal on a incomplete-hewn plinth, and, in a curiously striking piece, placed a cool fly on a greasy suave of I Can’t Suppose It’s Not Butter. A video in which Bolam toys with another frigid insect adds a deep note to the skewed jocularity.

Erik Smith’s m is, by comparison, almost takings, using snacks as raw materials to talent a sort of esculent minimalism: grapes are strung just on a wire bisecting his studio leeway, pizza boxes are neatly stacked in a corner and knobbly cheese-flavoured crisps are piled into towers.

Like Hughes-Jones, Penny Rafferty makes use of honey, but this notwithstanding in what looks to have been a rather severe performance, which socialistic great smears of moonless paint and honey, applied with strips of make-up across the studio walls. Helen Tubriddy’s has an air of intensity, too, but the results are more controlled, with a mesh of umbrellas and see in the mind's eye frames destroyed down and reassembled to deportment a spindly infestation, accompanied by smashed, smeared eggs and balloons filled with yolk.

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