30/03/2022 – The New Contemporary

For two years, there was no New Contemporary showing at the RSA in Edinburgh. Scotland had no new contemporary artists. Apparently, no fresh work to see and certainly no audience to see it.

Art school graduates set to show their work were left in limbo, their time at art school was over but there was no grand finale. No degree show, no RSA exhibition, no hype for the emerging talent and general busyness that comes with finishing art school and making the abrupt transition from an Art Student™ to an Artist™.

Finally those 2020 graduates whose work was selected have now had their work in the RSA building. Taking both the whole upstairs space and part of the basement, the show features approximately 50 graduates and the work that would have been a part of their degree show – meaning that much of the work has been unseen in a public setting and the graduates may not have had much audience response to the work previously.

Some stand outs were; the tufted rug works of Molly Kent which explore the feeling of being trapped – both mentally and physically, an abstracted installation involving body like shapes and their growths by Gaia Tretmani, the delicate paintings of tights and sculptural textile by Alicja Rodzik, and the impressive giant collage drawings of fantasy and folklore by Madeline Wood.

Here, the works that I felt stood out had a delicacy about the human body; an element of care and consideration of its representation as well as its physical functioning.

While this is something I enjoyed on a personal level, I didn’t find much of the work in this delayed showing of work particularly hard hitting. In some ways, the work felt safe for the institution to show in light of the events that have unfolded and continue to unfold since the beginning of 2020. Many of the descriptions of the work and intro to the artists show a reflection on the work in relation to the Coronavirus pandemic, even though there is the strong possibility that the work was actually produced before the pandemic caused the complete shutdown.

This is not to say that this is a particularly bad thing however, as the meaning of work will always change in relation to the context it is shown in – for example the works highlighted above may not have been read as so involved in the delicacy of the human body, if it had not been for our newfound hyper-awareness of the fragility of the body.

It also makes sense that an institution like the RSA would not pick works that could be risky to show in the future, when the decision was made two years ago – as we all have seen, a lot can change in a short space of time.

It does, as it always is with graduate work, make you think about what the future of Scottish contemporary art will be. In the next 10 years will one of these people be the next It Artist? What kind of work will be big in the galleries, what thematically will be the big buzz word? You would think currently it would be sustainability/the climate crisis/the Anthropocene, but in this showing I did not find much of it – something I was secretly glad about, as I recognise it as a massive issue, most definitely worthy of discussion, but I am getting a little tired of seeing the same groups discussing the same issue. A circle does not enact change.

What I couldn’t help considering as well, was where these graduates were now. What did they all do after graduating into what was essentially a liminal space? What work have they made since this work – what I would have found interesting would be to present a small selection of their degree show work, alongside work made in the two years meantime. A way of showing how the work has changed and developed in response to the conditions they found themselves in.

I can accept that this will probably not have been a feasible idea, due to space in the actual gallery, along with the pressure this would put on the artists when they may not have the space/time/capacity to just generate more new work, for an exhibition that was promised to them back when they finished university. And besides, I can imagine for many graduates this may have provided the sense of finality that they had been craving, the finishing goal of having the work they spent so long making and envisioning finally being seen in a public setting.

Perhaps in the future there will be a shake up to the way in which the New Contemporaries exhibition functions, beyond an amalgamation of the art school’s of Scotland’s degree shows. Not that I personally have any grand old ideas on what this could be at this moment, but I do believe that the moment we are in calls for a great shake up in how our exhibitions function, and how we treat our art school graduates, for the post-graduate creative burn out is massively real but that’s an essay for another time.

On a concluding note, I found that as someone who graduated a short time after these people (2021), the exhibition was hopeful, and it felt right to see these young artists get the time that they so deserved, and while not all the work resonated in a particularly strong way, I still felt it a fair selection of the issues and interests of this generation of artist. I guess I can agree that sometimes art does not need to shock, put people in a place of uncomfortablilty, or be highly conceptualised to discuss big issues, and that sometimes the delicacy of the work can make just as big an impact. I look forward to revisiting the RSA for the 2021 version of the New Contemporaries whenever it may be.