Vibrant new art that entertains and moves

Established in 2009, New Contemporaries aims to showcase the best of new art and architecture graduates from Scotland’s art schools. This year 105 graduates from 2022 and 2023 make it a bumper edition. For gallerists, dealers and the public it is a bellwether for the creative energies flowing through the country.

Three words describe this show: materiality, youth and energy. Not long ago, art schools were falling over themselves to close departments that offered students the chance to get their hands dirty, such as ceramics and fibre. Fashions change and physical making by hand, rather than through electronic media, is now in the ascendent. Huge tapestries, wall- hangings, installations and decorative surfaces abound and are done justice by the spatial arrangement of the large, well-lit galleries.

Work by Tilly Glancy (The Nomadic Sundial II), Maella Wallace (Ceremony Wall Tapestry 1), Lucy Gibb (The Guide), Louis Baillie (Bush), Ammna Sheikh (The Richer a Persian, the Finerhis Rugs) and Finn Rosenbaum (Bell Installation) typifies this approach. Ceramics has a particularly fine showing: Eilidh Guthrie combines this with photography to explore death and rebirth. Her hybrid zoomorphic and biomorphic forms are both fascinating and repellent. The loss of human and natural cultures is of concern to many artists and here is no exception. Save Me!! By Tracy Exton-McShane is a 50m muslin scroll on which is printed the names of thousands of endangered languages, while Tom Fairlamb (The Achievement Society) celebrates the complexity of the apine ecosystem while drawing attention to its fragility.

Language is also of interest to Dexter Turriff-Davies and Iona Peterson, who respectively use Scots and Gaelic in their work. Turriff- Davies’s large poems and photographs poignantly combine to explore personal and national identity.

Painting is strongly represented, in particular by the autobiographical domestic miniatures of Tegan Chaffer, the complex seascapes of Mary Bowen and the large celebratory oils of Remi Jablecki.

See this exciting, vibrant show and be entertained, uplifted and moved.

The Royal Scottish Academy, The Mound, Edinburgh. Until April 24