RSA New Contemporaries review — artists defy lockdowns to bring their work into light

New Contemporaries, which is now in its 14th year, has become an annual fixture, providing a platform for the most promising graduates of Scotland’s schools of art and architecture. The current show celebrates the work of students who graduated in 2021 (a fact which may explain the re-emergence of works that use digital media).

The show is prestigious and career-launching, and the RSA does a good job of promoting and nurturing new talent with a plethora of prizes, awards, and residencies. One of the spacious galleries is dedicated to architecture, where you’ll find an impressive and complex series of large-scale drawings by Nassim Belgroune. These were originally conceived in charcoal, but here are reproduced digitally. The architect explores the possibilities of the vernacular of his native Algeria as the basis for sympathetic contemporary development. In the same room, Maisie Tudge celebrates the Victorian architecture of Edinburgh and Glasgow in a series of prints, technical drawings and found fragments such as bricks, slates, and massive slabs of bolted roof timbers.

Wood is also the preferred medium of highly talented sculptor Otto Gobey, who uses several native species to create forms that refer to pre-industrial timber construction techniques. Grate is a series of robust, jointed oak uprights held together by primitive dovetail joints and nails -- although abstract and purely sculptural it hints at utility, and the architectural.

Lorna Phillips’s beautifully crafted ceramic objects and delicate pencil drawings explore natural and man-made landscape and form – whether it be the Kunda clay mine in Estonia or Bettyhill Cove in the Highlands. This is work that delves under the surface of things and explores the geological, the archaeological and sense of place. Kirsty Smith’s sculpture also has an earthy, physical quality – and her work with stone, glass and graphite is elemental and tactile.

In the basement, the work of Ruth Tait is an elegiac testament to place and loss. The everyday litter of black, plastic bale-wrap has been transformed into a series of powerful upright totems, entitled Widows while a repurposed chest of drawers now carries the name A Kist of Memories.

Despite the privations of lockdown, these artists have managed to produce inspiring work – that’s now emerging into the light.

     Until April 16