Glasgow School of Art Graduate Showcase 2021 review: Grasping for the unusual

Five hundred graduates across five schools and a press release running to 21 pages. It’s a great opportunity for a tech-savvy viewer with time to spare but a reviewer’s nightmare. Where to start? How to navigate this amount of information? Such shows are now as much about assessing the quality of a website as about art.

The site is thus arranged not only departmentally and individually but also thematically as, “adaption and reinvention”, “neurodiversity and visibility”, “race and decolonisation”, “social injustice”, and “Covid and tomorrow’s world”. I found myself seeking out work that did not fit such categorisation, starting at the Department of Sculpture & Environmental Art. Francisco Llinas Casas is interested in the diaspora of Bolivia. With his mother, he crocheted a hammock and this was part of an installation, Physichromie con Mamá y Chinchorro, where the hammock represents the precarious and temporary spaces inhabited by many migrants.

Llinas has collaborated with Paria Moazemi Goodarzi, a fellow student, who is also interested in human displacement. Her work uses shredded paper and cages as symbols of human fragility and also, perhaps, resilience.

Some of the language is questionable. Glasgow School of Art (GSA) says Goodarzi “responds to such contemporary, cultural and political aporias by examining the hybrid condition of our society and the processes of formation, performance and representation of identity through a multidisciplinary praxis that often takes the shape of collaborative, participatory and socially-engaged artworks.” What? Who writes such material and why? If engagement and dialogue is the goal, surely such gobbledegook is self-defeating?

Moving on, painter Paulina Pawlik-Barborka explores the human need for prayer. She has something meaningful to say, in work elegantly and engagingly expressed, drawing as much from the tradition of her native Poland as from the teachings of GSA.

Equally talented is Lizzie Little, another figurative painter, who has reimagined the themes of love and war in Botticelli’s Venus and Mars. Her couples are seen in the aftermath of argument, or comfortable in middle-aged acceptance.

Muriel Gray, chairwoman of the GSA, said the only downside of the show being online was that she was unable to chat to students in person. There’s more to it than that. The inability to sense fully a painting, a piece of jewellery or a chair, diminishes it. GSA staff and students have worked hard to bring this together. But they deserve better. Let’s hope next year it’s “in the flesh”.