GSA Supplement 2025

Matthew Kriske, MFA

Welcome

Welcome to The Skinny’s preview of The Glasgow School of Art Degree Show 2025. This annual exhibition of graduating student work is a highlight in the Scottish arts calendar. You can always expect innovative approaches, bold ideas, and a distinct sense of collaboration and community from the work on show.

This student-led supplement acts as a survey and preview of the Degree Show, exploring our four specialist schools: the Mackintosh School of Architecture, the School of Fine Art, the School of Design and the School of Innovation and Technology. Our student writing team is comprised of third year undergraduates, who have now become expert voices on the approaches, techniques and concepts explored by the community of artists and practitioners at The Glasgow School of Art.

The work discussed is varied and multifaceted, but there are unifying themes – how personal and cultural identity intersect; the comforting ephemera of memory; how the deeply personal can be prescient and political. There is also a throughline of civic responsibility across architecture, art and design. Sustainability, marginalised perspectives and climate action are put front and centre.

Each feature within this magazine explores the depth and detail of these themes, shaped by interviews and thoughtful conversations with exhibiting Degree Show students. There is

exploration of method and technique alongside investigative questioning. This makes the supplement a useful map of the Degree Show 2025 whether you’re visiting in person or online.

The on-campus Degree Show coincides with the launch of its digital showcase. This platform is a place for students to present their work online, complete with personal context, and notes on their study and practice. It also gives audiences outside of Glasgow the chance to engage with the work of this year’s graduating cohort. Each page of the digital showcase has been curated by our graduands to display their processes, ideas and pictures of their work. As well as browsing by school and by student, entries have been categorised by theme. This emphasises the connections between works and provides a new angle on a traditional degree show exhibition.

The Degree Show isn’t the only thing happening at The Glasgow School of Art this summer. Check out the Heads Up section at the back of this supplement to find highlights for your diary in the months ahead.

We hope you enjoy this exclusive look at this year’s Degree Show 2025, and we look forward to welcoming you in person if you can make it. Finally, we’d like to give a huge thank you to our student writers, who have worked hard to bring the supplement together. Congratulations to The Glasgow School of Art Class of 2025.

This supplement was produced in association with The Glasgow School of Art

4 The presentation from the School of Fine Art features work which reaches out for connection through bold approaches to Fine Art Photography, Sculpture and Environmental Art, and Painting and Printmaking.

6 Across varied disciplines, the School of Design unveil stories told through form, function and fearless imagination.

8 Work from the MDes Communication Design cohort question the best ways to communicate personal, public and political ideas.

9 The School of Innovation and Technology explores the future of its specialisms with work across the scope of digital design and technology.

10 The Mackintosh School of Architecture presents work that engages with civic responsibility, sustainability and urgent climate action.

13 With a presentation that takes over the Glue Factory, work from the Master of Fine Art programme plays with uncertainty, memory, ephemera and decay.

14 From summer courses to exhibitions, here’s a Heads Up of what’s happening at the GSA in the next few months.

Listen to exhibiting students talk about the process of putting their shows together in the GSA Degree Show podcast, which will be available shortly after Degree Show opens to the public on 30 May. They will be joined by members of the student writing team for this supplement.

The student writing team is comprised of Miranda Owen Wintersgill, Angus Hamilton James, Naomi Bull, Kavya Kadakia Amish, Maud Wheldon-Posner, Malak Naseem, Yuchen Liu, Helin Yao and Arabella Goff

Fine Art

In this year’s Degree Show, students in the School of Fine Art are reaching out for connection, building worlds, and constructing narratives that question memory, place, and concepts of the self, both culturally and individually

Words: Miranda Owen Wintersgill and Angus Hamilton James

This year’s graduating Sculpture and Environmental Art students have shown a distinct move away from minimalism. Instead, this exhibition features a wealth of personal, theatrical, and autobiographical artwork exploring myth, culture, movement, and memories.

Emilia Evans-Munton’s project Remember I’m Still Here is a 20-metre long sock monkey, designed to set the tone for the sculpture year group, and is the first thing viewers see as they approach the Stow Building. This work, like many others from the year group, is intended to create a welcoming space in which to gather and interact. In many areas, in fact, students have broken away from the conceptual elements that can distance many viewers, and moved towards creating work to be enjoyed by a wider audience through shared experience and interaction.

Inside the building, Harry Boulton’s immersive installation explores the process of moving home and digs into the idea that ‘shelters are not just structures but containers of identity, (and) memory’. Boulton plays with the idea of

claustrophobia, utilising a vast array of moving parts and materials. Like many of the sculpture students, he seizes the final opportunity to go big.

Mimicking movement as it occurred in ancient tales, Agnes Sharp’s performance work draws on themes from The Odyssey. Sharp’s exhibition consists of a series of photographs documenting her journey dra ing a two-metre-long steel and wood trailer from the Stow Building to Queen's Park, carrying PA systems, light and band equipment. This performance happened alongside a choir, her friends, and many members of the public, who spent the time telling stories, singing, and moving the cart in the rain in a display of community and human connection through storytelling.

Maha Al Yousefi similarly explores these themes, asking viewers to reflect on the ‘fluidity of home and the traces we carry with us’. Their work examines the concept of belonging through the lens of Eastern iconography, asking how culture forms both personal and collective narratives. Sustainability is a vital influence across the programme, and Al Yousefi poses it as a metaphor with

the cyclical character of memory being mirrored in the recycled paper they sculpt from.

In a separate exploration of home, Morfo Nikita’s work takes from her experiences in her home of Nicosia, Cyprus. For her section of the Degree Show, Nikita will be showing a home-made buffer zone, which, using peepholes, reveals traces of an unenterable other side. This process imagines links between Glasgow and Nicosia, as well as artist and viewer.

Sol Pawlyn’s work utilises almost every department and workshop available to students at the GSA. His honest and visually striking work, comprised of colourful masks with sinister expressions, uses a mythical lens to navigate how his early experiences of relationships and adulthood were shaped by Grindr as he critiques the grooming culture perpetuated by the app.

Finally for Scuplture and Environmental Art, Alexandra Smart will be exhibiting a multimedia installation centred around a collection of teapots and embroidered tea towels. Working in response to the death of her father last year, Smart explores her feelings of being neither Scottish nor Welsh, and her distant memories and links to her family. This is presented through playful and camp forms, which tangle together self portraiture, tourist souvenirs, Toby Jugs, and Pagan mythological symbolism.

This Fine Art Photography year group has shown a clear shift away from the traditional toward an exploration of the auditory, sculptural, and digital. Many students in photography have worked collaboratively with the School of Design and other departments to explore how shared practices and exhibitions enrich their work.

Examining culture through music and sound, Mimi Belilty delves into her Moroccan heritage in relation to the death of her father. Like Smart, this exhibition centres around culture and community, featuring intermittent performances, visiting student groups, the ingredients to make traditional Moroccan tea, and a rug to lie on, all of which take place ‘within an instrument’ created by the artist. Agnes Little’s work delves into cybernetics and relationships through a series of runs. Documentation in their space will show Little’s run around Stow Building, in which their direction for the next section was given to them by sensors attached to Arduino computers at checkpoints. Likewise, a typeface made in collaboration with Lydia Harris (School of Design) will be on show, built from the shapes of a similar series of runs made during this project.

In the adjacent space, Tom Gibson, a longtime collaborator of Little’s, explores paths in a

different way. By attaching trackers to disposed objects, Gibson follows their journeys. The space features 180 starting point photos, a film compiling 330,000 Google Maps screenshots, and a series of physical maps, which explore and expose the malpractice of waste disposal. Gibson also presents a typeface made in collaboration with design students, which this time acts as a code that viewers are challenged to decipher as they engage with the space.

Jonathan Pratt (Fine Art Photography) and Freya McKinty (Painting and Printmaking) present a collaborative project from across programmes. This space brings together two bodies of work created in dialogue, and both artists explore what is lost and gained as imagery moves between the digital and the physical. The space itself is intended to mirror places designed to be passed through, taking from lobbies, hallways, stage sets, and First-Person Shooter levels such as Medal of Honour’s ‘Metro-Plex’, which is seen stripped of textures in the exhibition. The construction of the space is left visible and bare, bringing the unseen processes and elements of the building into the spotlight in an attempt to question institutional exhibitions and ignored imagery.

In Painting and Printmaking, students have been working back and forth from the playful to the formal, building poignant fictitious narratives for viewers to get lost in.

Iris May inquires into loneliness and digital noise, specifically concerning young people

post-COVID. May constructs curious and familiar flatpack creations that are perhaps more like friends than sculptures. The resulting forms are dreamlike, exploring a search for connection through an exa erated creation of queer bodies. May also shows a large collage constructed from her previous work. This piece portrays digital noise and critiques social media and overconsumption without any individual blame or superiority. The overlapping layers of painting, drawing and collage perhaps su est creation and community as the answer to these concerns.

In her solo work for Painting and Printmaking, intuition and play are essential to Freya Davies Her project delves into the domesticity of the home by capturing energy and character using bright colours and bold patterns to form nostalgic still lifes. Davies creates theatrical work, slightly detached from reality, that toils with perspective. She encourages the viewer to find colour and joy within their everyday lives.

Ruby Atkins displays large theatrical oil paintings that follows chains of faked, copied, and appropriated works to subvert the subject matters and styles of traditional oil painting. Atkins reimagines them by using visibly modern colouring and a contemporary twist while still working from history to investigate the cyclical nature of art movements and stories.

Design

At the School of Design, a unifying theme weaves through diverse disciplines, as the Class of 2025 unveil designs that intertwine the personal and the cultural – stories told through form, function, and fearless imagination

Words: Naomi Bull and Kavya Kadakia Amish

The Product Design Engineering programme bridges engineering and design disciplines to develop, build, and test innovative product solutions to real-world challenges. Jake Lee’s project tackles the petrochemical waste produced within the surfing industry by replacing traditional foams and resins with sustainably sourced, natural alternatives. Lee’s beginner surfboard features an engineered industrial moulding process for a mycelium composite core and the rest of the natural board. The result is an entirely natural board that can completely biodegrade.

Sophie Willis looks at protecting the marine habitats in Scotland, which, despite their importance, often fall to community organisations and citizen scientists for research and preservation. To support these efforts, Willis is developing a data collection device that bridges the gap between prohibitively expensive research equipment and the more affordable but time-intensive methods currently available. Killian Maguire proposes an alternative approach to communal music listening by disconnecting from personal smartphones,

which are poorly adapted to shared social environments. His streaming controller facilitates a more collaborative and haptic mode of engagement, fostering social connection through the shared use of a physical device.

Driven by vision and purpose, this year’s Interior Design students transform Glasgow’s derelict buildings into vibrant catalysts for urban renewal. Barsha Poudel’s project, Grow and Gather Hub, embodies this spirit of transformation. Rooted in the desire to bring farming closer to urban life, it reimagines Glasgow’s historic rotundas as vibrant centres for growing, learning, and community engagement. The project bridges the gap between city living and sustainable food production, creating a dynamic environment where people of all ages can reconnect with nature through hands-on farming, educational workshops, and shared experiences.

Sophia Cavalluzzi’s work envisions an evolving digital detox facility that offers users immersive, anatomy-inspired experiences designed to promote a full-body reset from the

relentless pace of the digital world. The project is founded by Sono the Collective, a global design studio committed to creating experiences that address the darker impacts of the digital age for the benefit of human well-being. The detox facility is located within the Botanic Gardens Railway, extending nearly one kilometre through this unique urban landscape.

Jessie Orville’s Shades is an inclusive beauty retail concept that celebrates multiculturalism, focusing on people of colour and mixed-heritage identities. The five-storey space blends cultural storytelling, handcrafted materials, and interactive tools to reimagine the beauty shopping experience. From swatch cards that match diverse skin tones to haircare education and a multicultural tea bar, each floor explores a different stage of personal identity. Inspired by traditions worldwide, Shades centres individuality, connection, and confidence. It’s more than a store – it is a space honouring heritage, building community, and making everyone feel seen and celebrated.

The graduating Fashion Design students’ collections celebrate creative freedom and diversity, reflecting a wide range of audiences, concepts, processes, and making practices, each shaped by individual passions and perspectives. Kyra Ho’s project engages with Edward Saïd’s concept of Orientalism by uncovering the overlooked histories of the women in her family, particularly their roles as Chinese hospitality workers. Rather than reinforcing the Western gaze that romanticises or exoticises the East, her work actively dismantles these narratives by grounding itself in the textures of lived experience. Through design, she weaves together stories of resilience, care, and quiet strength – narratives often marginalised yet essential to the spaces they nurture and sustain.

Duncan Brown explores the intersection of identity, image, and the pursuit of personal growth through clothing. Drawing from the narrative within his wardrobe, he examines how his clothes reflect his story, rooted in a working-class upbringing, grounded in tradition, and shaped by practicality and simplicity. With aspirations to progress beyond the confines of his roots while still honouring them, Brown embraces minimalist design principles to curate a wardrobe for the everyday, one that merges tradition with modernity. Through clean lines, neutral tones, and thoughtful tailoring, he expresses personal growth, pride in his origins, and the ambition to evolve beyond them. Tarika Kinney’s graduate collection, Progeny, is a tribute to her matriarchal heritage, blending Irish and Indian influences through craftsmanship and sustainable design. Rooted in memory and identity, each piece transforms deadstock materials into tactile, intimate garments using heat pressing, casting, and knit

layering techniques. Prioritising circularity, tradition, and innovation, Progeny challenges fast fashion with a slow, intentional approach. It is a deeply personal exploration of legacy, material rebirth, and the lasting bond between garment and wearer.

This year’s cohort from Communication Design engage with a multitude of themes. In particular, a common thread is connections. They pose the questions of how we connect with each other, the world and beyond. In her beautiful body of work, Amber Charlton reflects on her mother’s practice as a furniture maker – creating a stunning film that engages with personal relationships but also urges an audience to think about our families’ lives before our existence and the choices mothers are criticised for when raising children, whilst also cultivating their own lives. Her work takes a collaborative step with her mother as they create a frame together, incorporating their practices and their connection. This frame hosts part of her work.

Marko Hallauer reworks traditional scopes of illustration through vivacious worldbuilding in their practice, connecting the audience to new existences. Drawing upon daydreams, the whimsical, Hayao Miyazaki’s animations, and narrative, Hallauer formulates a complex and beautiful board game, interactive and eye-catching, that explores imaginative flora and mycelium. In terms of material, the work is fired clay; it feels delicate, yet holds a strong place with colour, whimsy and creativity. The ambitious work is entirely playable and engages players on an imaginative, sociable level.

In Silversmithing and Jewellery the students this year explore personal, narrative jewellery looking at the tangible interactions between traditional structures and new material. Sorcha Carlin's collection ‘Through her hands, then mine’ explores historical forms and heirlooms through the inspiration of her grandmother’s jewellery box. The box is a self-portrait, a collection of gestures and connections, and a quiet mourning of past selves. Her collection looks at imprints of the past. It utilises materials familiar to her daily life; hair extensions, nail polish, teeth and her own hair. The collection is deeply personal and gifts wearers and viewers an insight to her life and history. Another student, Holly Brigitte MacDonald, creates an ongoing narrative with the city of Glasgow through

her collection, Vestige. Her work speaks to the tension of being stuck and nearing freedom – it is about transformation and becoming new. The traditional materials reflect delicacy, a contrast for the structures of the city – enamel, silver and glass.

This year’s Interaction Design students are an innovative and intimate group with students engaging in a wide range of tools, prominently new media. With themes of connectivity through technology, sound and person, student Ally Radomski engages with a myriad of sonic textures from our world, and the processing sound goes through. An elaborate and innovative work, they create an ecosystem of sounds in an installation An array of floating ears, which leaves the innards of cables exposed demonstrating an organism of sound. In their words, “You are not hearing a place. You are hearing an interpretation.” This work – like many of the interaction pieces – is made to be experienced and immersed within.

The work from Textile Design this year plays upon the beauty of traditional technique and how this evolves to live and weave its way into our lives

now. Esme Lawton is an embroiderer creating a series of textile pieces inspired by traditional Catholic garments – that of nun habits and the like. She draws her inspiration from items collected on travels, and refers these back to her own family’s archive of iconography, as well as being influenced by a Catholic upbringing and how this plays into her making. All of the collection is made by hand and with the use of scavenged materials, creating a visually didactic look. Another student, Zofia Szewcyzk, explores the organic and synthetic, asking the question the question: what’s the most reliable way to heal? She wants to create a bridge between natural, alternative medicine and scientific, cosmetic solutions to create the ultimate wellbeing experience. Her work is immersive as she explores scent, imbuing her fabrics with aromatherapy. Her inspirations come from microscopic exploration at the University of Glasgow and she blends this into the colour and patterns of her collection.

School of Design Degree Show, Reid Building, 30 May-8 Jun

MDes Communication Design

The students featured in this year’s MDes Communication Design cohort use mixed media tools to explore personal and political narratives

Words: Helin Yao

Yueke Yin’s Have a Seat at the Table explores gender through the body, seen from the angles of relationship, connection, and gaze.

Drawing from personal and observed experiences growing up in China, Yin reflects on how patriarchy shapes women’s lives – from childhood expectations to workplace discrimination and domestic imbalance.

Her project is a response to the everyday stories often dismissed as ‘normal’, reclaiming them as sites of resistance. The title borrows a phrase now echoed among young Chinese women seeking presence and dignity. Through this work, Yin invites viewers to witness not only the stru le for a seat at the table – but the demand to eat well, and to be full.

Yixuan Du’s Ideal Museum is a speculative curatorial project that reimagines how cultural artefacts are displayed and interpreted. The work began with a mislabelled bronze tapir in Glasgow’s Burrell Collection – a moment that led Du to question how misinterpretation occurs when objects are displaced from their original cultural contexts.

In response, she critiques the linear, objectled logic of traditional museums and proposes a more participatory, imaginative approach. The fictional museum unfolds across six themed rooms: reconstructing historical setting, comparing visual forms, tracing patterns and motifs, grouping by era and material, linking to texts, and restoring everyday or ritual use. Each room offers a different way to re-engage with the object and its cultural echoes.

The project culminates in six thematic posters and two printed publications, weaving together research, visual design, and narrative. Rather than centring collection or ownership, Du’s museum becomes a space for resonance – where artefacts are not just preserved, but reanimated through context and imagination.

Natasha Boys’ I Beg Their Pardon! reframes the Scottish witch trials through a contemporary feminist lens, drawing parallels between historic persecution and modern systems of control. The project centres on the lack of legal pardons for those accused of witchcraft, using their stories to explore ongoing pressures for women to conform.

At its core is The Drowning Pond Projections – a photographic series created at Mugdock’s historical drowning pond where legend has it that suspected witches were put on trial. In Boys’ work, quotes and reflections are projected onto the landscape. These images explore how

framing, space, and site shape meaning, and how violence echoes through cultural memory.

Referencing the UK Supreme Court’s recent ruling on the legal definitions of ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ within the Equality Act, the project critiques today’s regulation of gender expression. Boys reveals how mechanisms of fear, once embodied by water, persist in new forms – reshaped, but not erased.

Upasana Chadha’s project brings attention to an often overlooked environmental catastrophe – the widespread harm caused by industrial fishing and abandoned equipment known as ghost nets. These lost or discarded fishing nets silently drift through the oceans, ensnaring marine life and leading to slow, painful deaths.

An estimated 300,000 whales and dolphins die each year due to entanglement according to the World Wildlife Fund.

In response, Chadha created a 100-page publication that translates a stark research finding into visual form: for every whale or dolphin lost, four fragments of fishing gear remain. Central to the design is a mono-printed texture of a fruit net – an everyday object reimagined as the ghost nets that haunt our seas. This texture threads through the publication and a series of experiments in dry-point etching and mono-printing.

While the project mourns the impact of human activity, it also celebrates the whale as a majestic being. Through this dual lens, Chadha invites an empathetic witnessing of ecological loss and a deeper reflection on how we might live in harmony with the oceans that sustain us.

Across these projects, personal experience becomes a lens for wider critique – whether exploring gender, cultural memory, or ecological harm. Through the lens of communication design, the students reframe what has been overlooked, misread, or silenced. Their works share a common urgency: a desire to reimagine, to resist, and to reshape. Through image, text and form, they ask not only what stories we tell, but how we tell them – and who gets to speak. In doing so, they offer not just reflections, but futures.

MDes Communication Design Degree Show, Reid Building, 30 May-8 Jun

Innovation and Technology

The School of Innovation and Technology are working to reshape the future of their specialisms. Producing ideas behind the scenes, SIT students work ambitiously to enhance today’s scope of digital design and technology

Words: Arabella Goff

Students in the School of Innovation and Technology develop self-directed, exploratory approaches to 21st-century innovation. Investigating the intersection of human experience and emerging technologies, students embody the roles of visionaries, designers and innovators.

Lewis Davidson, a student of the Sound for the Moving Image programme, is an audiovisual artist practising an experimental ‘flow-state’ approach. In his film Pairilis Anama (‘Soul Paralysis’ in Gaelic), Lewis begins with visual rendering, followed by the creation of his soundscapes. Basing audio on what can be seen, Davidson captures feelings of destruction and corruption through natural imagery. This allows Davidson to guide us through a digitalised journey, where audio choices enhance our emotional responses. Feelings of fear, shock, destruction and persistence transport the viewer into an ever-changing environment, where each visual transition leads us to a scene of rendered debris. The continual regeneration of natural scenery is su ested by Davidson to represent the human mind’s ability to grow out of control.

As a part of the Immersive Systems Design programme, students can specialise in one of two distinct pathways – 3D Modelling or Games and Virtual Reality (VR). As a cartoon fanatic, Freya Stanley joined directly into 3D Modelling in year two. Exploring facial animation through their creation of a female character; ‘Magik’ can present 66 micro-expressions. Transforming the possibility of characterisation, Stanley has enabled Magik to smile, frown, express disgust, lip-sync and overall evoke human-like feelings.

Speaking with Magik takes influence from the character Magik from X-Men and Anya Taylor-Joy’s facial structure. After watching cartoons over summer, Stanley wanted to give animated characters a more enhanced, memorable quality, in which they go beyond the conventional cartoon expression. Focusing on increased nuance, Stanley aims to move away from the over-simplified world of animated expression.

Using a combination of ZBrush and 3DSMax (3D-modelling software), Stanley sculpted the head shape and manipulated expression through digital ‘carving’. A combination of skills, creativity and resilience led Stanley to a developed, final female figure that challenges emotional capacities within digital design.

Games and VR student Rebecca Ward provides an insight into the extensive creativity involved within the programme. Ward’s final project, The Tale of Flicker Wickworth, is an immersive

puzzle that invites players into a cosy environment. Guided by Flicker, a little candle, players endure his grand ascent to the top of an abandoned wizard’s cabin. The goal is to reach ‘The Big Light’.

Designed at a time of personal loss and grieving, Ward’s intention is to represent the journey of life. Each phase of the game is associated with the trials and tribulations we go through. Using digital drawing tools, and motivation from personal life events, Ward has created an engaging and mystical work of art for others to experience.

Awarded the Material Innovation Award by Weavers of Glasgow, Product Design student Aisling Walsh explores regenerative textile practices. Unspun, a sustainable bio-based yarn, raises questions around the industrialisation of material and how local, adaptive and circular processes could be our future.

Composed of food waste and flax, Unspun demonstrates an exciting diversion from the globalisation of material production and its invisible and extractive nature. What makes Unspun unique is Walsh's ‘mill meets lab’ approach; ‘mill’ becomes both a site of production and education for users to gain insight into textile practice and its life cycle.

Developing a ‘closed loop’ system, Unspun yarn can be traced across all stages (from soil to final textile), demonstrating a project sensitive to its current climate. Walsh poses a relevant creation in a world challenged by environmental, cultural and technological change.

Alcohol has the pub and caffeine has cafes. If all drugs were legalised, what spaces would need to exist to destigmatise and educate, rather than romanticise and encourage? Product Design student Luke Aitken turns to the public to find out. When asked ‘What if, in 2050, all drugs were legalised?’ Aitken proposed the Ethical Consumption Garden – a project that raises questions around substance relationships.

Designing Glasgow’s first opium garden, Aitken creates dialogue and encourages decision-making

regarding long-term drug policies. Gathering data from the original exhibit at Strange Field, Aitken generates proposals for policies concerning the future of drug use. Undeniably, the Ethical Consumption Garden uncovers uncomfortable truths and encourages provocative responses, ultimately working towards a change.

FLOK: The Wool 3D Printer transforms low-value sheep’s wool, often discarded or burned, into functional printed forms. Designed by Product Design student Iestyn Howorth, this speculative fabrication system offers a solution for farmers to make further use of ‘redundant’ wool. In Scotland today, it costs more to shear a sheep than to sell its fleece, reducing wool to a by-product of meat production.

Supporting the machine is a service platform designed to distribute making across rural communities, featuring open-source printer plans, hands-on onboarding for farmers, and access to a shared digital marketplace where wool-printed objects can be sold. FLOK proposes a circular, community-led alternative: a printer that doesn’t just fabricate products but reconfigures relationships between land, labour, and technology.

School of Innovation and Technology Degree Show, Haldane Building, 30 May-8 Jun

Architecture

This year’s Mackintosh School of Architecture showcase presents a glimpse into the responsibilities future architects must inhabit, through teachings of ecology and sustainability

Words: Maud Wheldon-Posner and Malak Naseem

In a time of heightened awareness of the climate crisis, social injustice and political instability, there has never been a more critical time to examine the civic role of architecture. The students’ work in this year’s Mackintosh School of Architecture showcase displays an innate understanding of architectural accountability, one that confronts the past to create for the future.

In understanding the complicated histories and surroundings of their assigned sites, this year’s students have translated the social and environmental concerns and placed community at the heart of design in shaping their proposals. Through drawings, renders and models, the Bourdon Building is transformed not just into an organised display, but most importantly, into a space to envision a more hopeful future.

The Stage 3 showcase offers an introspective outlook on the Scottish Highlands by raising awareness about its political and social landscape through careful and innovative design. Hidden histories are exposed upon closer inspection, and in combination with a calculated choice of materials, the students of Stage 3 put forward their critical perspectives.

Noah Alexander-Cairns’ project, A Memorial to a Sunken Village, brings to light the history of the Highland Clearances and the submerged ruins of a once-thriving community in his proposal for an observatory near the Lochaber hydroelectric scheme. Every aspect of the design process is steeped in politics, as even the path that leads to the observatory follows the history of the forgotten community and old roads that once existed. The observatory is a memorial to the forgotten Highland community on whose land the dam is situated now, but also to the Irish workers who lost their lives in constructing the hydroelectric scheme. With the use of recycled burnt timber to mimic the arrangement of the forest, the observatory creates a confinement of space for the viewer as they look outward to the open loch, which in turn inhabits the conversations of the present about the exploitation of the Scottish waters. With sustainability at the heart of creation, protection of histories as inspiration and careful attentiveness to the surrounding landscape, AlexanderCairns envisions a seafront structure that is as in touch with the people as it is with the landscape, thereby bridging its hidden history to the present.

Jennifer Lyall’s Lifelong Learning Retreat seeks to reintroduce the history of the Scottish Highlands’ paper industry that revived the landscape in and around Fort William. There is a delicate balance between educational and aesthetic purposes, playing with the site’s public and private surroundings, situated between a quiet burial ground and a public promenade. Juxtaposition underpins Lyall’s intricate design,

aiming to bond together both old and young, locals and tourists. With a focus on handmade paper, Lyall attended various workshops learning about this unique process. The space reflects this intimate and personal way of learning and presents itself as a heritage site, where these resources are to be preserved. Perforated aluminium coats the building in a double-skinned façade, echoing the appearance of a paper lantern – it becomes a beacon of light. Embracing the natural climate, a curved roof acts as an inverted umbrella. In turn, the rainwater flows into a central feature that runs through the building, adding to the tranquil experience and opening conversations about recyclability.

In line with the principles of connecting people to the impressive landscape of the Highlands, Alanya Price’s project Hydro-Pipes brings light to the Lochaber tunnels hidden beneath the mountains. Sitting right above the pressure tunnel hidden away by the natural landscape, Price’s design replicates the scale and feeling of being inside the pipe, emulating the claustrophobic experience of the workers involved in the construction of the hydropower scheme. The small sections of pipes not only follow the 15-milelong journey of the pressure tunnel beneath Ben Nevis, but also serve as a purposeful sensory experience for tourists and locals who stumble upon it. With each concrete pipe standing at a different angle and different patterns of holes cut into them, viewers can feel natural light and wind in a concentrated and unfamiliar way.

Moving from the challenges of the natural landscape to the urban, this year’s Stage 4 students showcase a collection of architectural projects that push the boundaries of conventional design, weaving together social, political and artistic movements, and considering how these themes sit within the city’s structure. This year, the students consider how they can revive the cultural landscape in Glasgow, developing archival institutions in today’s contemporary world.

Anthony Di Gaetano’s The Glasgow Film Institute is an extension of Film City Govan, a film production company based in Glasgow. Di Gaetano invites us into a lively social hub, where film as a storytelling medium is at the forefront of his design. In view from Central Station, the building is Glasgow’s cultural values immortalised. Confronted with an impressive, animated exterior, prolific film stills etched onto glass panels envelope the entire façade, drawing us into a spatial experience. Exposed cross-laminated timber, cork insulation and recycled steel run throughout the building, bridging together the industrial feel of Glasgow as a city and the intimate engagement with film. Adaptability at the core, there is the potential for a rolling programme via extendable

and foldable walls, platforming stories that aren’t always told and creating a unified arts space.

In working with the confines of the city centre, Ayça Zembat’s project combines the needs of her client, in creating a commercial building, with what is needed by the community of Glasgow. Using recycled timber, which mirrors the ethics of her client, Glasgow Wood, the five-storey design houses community-driven initiatives such as a gallery space, library and workshops. Zembat's design is inherently founded on sustainability, but also openness, bringing the public in and recognising initiatives that make the city lively and active. In direct contrast to the shielded tenement buildings found in the city centre, Zembat's design of the façade exudes warmth, with big, wide windows evoking intrigue in those who pass the building. These designs make any viewer wonder what other changes could be made or added to Glasgow’s landscape to improve the livelihoods of those who inhabit it.

Such ethics behind building within an established city is a growing concern amongst architects, and one that is presented by the Stage 5 showcase as they tackle these understandings in their project, The Ethical City, set in Porto, Portugal.

Margaret Harvie’s Civic Sanctuary reframes the city structure of Porto with the Jesuit Church as its backdrop. Marrying together religion, community and education, it offers a safe space for poverty-stricken communities. The carefully considered design integrates well into the crowded multi-level infrastructure of the city, actively engaging with ideas of intra-activity where the structure feels as though it emerges through the interconnectedness of the surrounding environment. Glue-laminated timber and polycarbonate materials encompass the façade, with different opacities and tectonic light features dotted across the myriad of spaces, creating a warm and inviting atmosphere. Porosity and openness emanate through the combinations of outdoor/indoor architecture, showcasing a chapel space, emergency accommodation, a dining hall and an educational centre forming the shape of an outstretched arm. Reconstructing our preconceptions of the church through a 21st-century lens, Harvie’s design reimagines the contemporary cultural landscape of Porto.

A distinct architectural shift is exhibited, displaying a new hopeful recognition of the architects’ impact on the climate and giving us a sneak preview into powerful and innovative visions of the future as they move beyond the Degree Show.

Mackintosh School of Architecture Degree Show, Bourdon Building, 30 May-8 Jun

Master of Fine Art

Moving through the fragile spaces between decay and desire, this year's MFA cohort bring a sharpened sensitivity to the overlooked architectures of daily life

Words: Yuchen Liu

The Master of Fine Art Class of 2025 have produced works that sift through the residue of the ordinary, searching for new forms of belonging, memory, and meaning amidst a landscape of erosion and uncertainty.

Rather than chasing the spectacular or the monumental, many of this year’s artists put their attention to smaller fractures – the unnoticed edges where time, labour, and memory quietly leave their marks. Across the Degree Show preparations, what emerges is not a singular vision but a shared impulse: to linger in spaces of fragility, and to rework the remnants of daily experience into something stubbornly resonant.

Drawing from the quick, informal marks scattered across the city, Jennifer Aldred’s work captures the ways people leave traces of themselves in public spaces. In drawings like Ian, she gathers gestures from scratched bathroom doors, layered billboards, and the faded remnants of renovation sites, reassembling them into dense, layered compositions. Alongside these urban fragments, she introduces small objects, like toy cars and plastic nameplate pendants, flattening and enlarging them through drawing until they slip between the personal and the symbolic. Her practice reflects on the human urge to assert presence in fleeting ways, and on how these signs, like a scrawled name or a fake diamond’s shimmer, once vivid, inevitably blur, overlap, and transform over time.

This attention to the overlooked extends into William Armstrong’s paintings, which explore the forgotten peripheries of the city. Through long walks across industrial estates, petrol stations, and retail parks, he documents landscapes shaped for vehicles more than people – spaces where human movement feels tentative, even misplaced. His canvases reconstruct these peripheral sites with a quiet tension, balancing the starkness of infrastructural decay with moments of unexpected lyricism. Armstrong’s practice su ests that even the most transient and utilitarian spaces bear the imprint of uncertain human presence. Labour, emotional fatigue, and the contemporary condition lie at the heart of Sophie Stewart’s practice. Her sculptural interventions – rusting restaurant bill trays, faux-concrete lottery stands, and found objects –confront the dehumanising realities of precarious employment, where enforced

optimism – like 'Yes I can' – rings hollow amid burnout and economic uncertainty. These quiet disruptions reveal both the illusion of hope and the weight of entrapment, offering a sharp yet humorous critique of consumer culture and societal expectation.

A different kind of intimacy unfolds in Matthew Kriske’s living-room-like installation, where watercolour paintings shaped like Polaroids cluster across softly painted walls and spill into the space. Each painting, delicate and translucent, evokes a fragment of memory – a scene glimpsed, a feeling half-held. Paired with a murmuring sound piece of confessional poetry, Kriske’s work constructs a domestic atmosphere that feels both familiar and slightly unmoored, as if the notion of ‘home’ were constantly rearranging itself. His practice su ests that family, home, and identity are less fixed entities than mutable fields, stitched together through dreams, losses, and the blurry sediment of everyday life.

Similarly attentive to the poetics of memory, Sophia Archontis layers handwritten poems, photographs, and sound recordings to evoke the shifting terrains of nostalgia and self-discovery. Her sound pieces, built from overlapping voices reading the same text, produce a disorienting yet tender chorus, where rhythms slip, words dissolve, and the act of remembering becomes a shared and unstable experience. In one handwritten line, she asks: “What does thinking sound like?” – a question that resonates across the exhibition, where thought itself becomes something audible, fractured, and unresolved.

Throughout the Degree Show, there is a palpable sense of artists resisting closure. Meaning remains provisional; images blur, fade, and erode rather than crystallising into fixed forms. Whether moving through the detritus of urban space, tracing the emotional sediments of labour, or navigating the porous landscapes of memory, these practices refuse the polished spectacle often demanded of contemporary art.

Instead, what they offer is slower, riskier: a sustained attention to what might otherwise disappear, a commitment to working with and through fragility. In an era dominated by speed, surface, and certainty, MFA artists this year remind us that there is still quiet defiance – and a different kind of endurance – to be found in assembling something lasting from the scattered, worn materials of experience.

MFA Degree Show, The Glue Factory, Glasgow, 29 May-8 Jun

Heads Up

The Degree Show isn’t the only event to look forward to at the GSA this summer. Here are some events, exhibitions and talks open to the public

GSA Highlands & Islands Summer Show

6 Jun, 11am-8pm, Altyre Campus, Blairs Farm Steading, Altyre Estate, Moray, IV36 2SH

An exhibition showcasing work from the GSA Highlands and Islands campus, generating future opportunities for collaboration across the region in learning, research and knowledge exchange.

GSASA Degree Show Afterparty 2025: The Last Dance!

29 May, The Vic and Assembly, 10pm until late

The Vic and Assembly is the place to be for students and friends celebrating the success of their exhibition previews. DJs Town Centre, Honey and Naman are in The Vic from 10pm, while GSA student radio station Hill52, Eclair Fifi, and Spencer take over the Assembly Hall from 11pm. This rite of passage is one for the books and should not be missed. We’ve leaned into a Y2K, American prom aesthetic with an

Open Studio Summer Exhibition

30 May-8 Jun, Fleming House, 134 Renfrew Street

Running in person and online, the Open Studio Summer Exhibition will feature work from the GSA Widening Participation programme, the Castlehead School of Creativity and the Glasgow Clyde College Associate Student Scheme.

Wastelands and the City

11 June, Reid Auditorium, The Glasgow School of Art, 164 Renfrew Street, 3-5.30 pm

In our fourth seminar in the Wastelands and the City series, entitled Re-making from Waste: Re-imagining Glasgow with time, space and nature, with Frances Robertson, Callum Sutherland, and Seamus Connelly, will focus on different areas of the City of Glasgow. In this session, we bring together an artist-theorist, a human geographer, and a public servant to think dynamically and openly about the possibilities afforded by such sites as well as to reveal the engagements already taking place in the city.

Portfolio

Preparation – Creative Practices Course

Courses running from June

The Portfolio Preparation course is a great way to learn about crafting a portfolio in a collaborative and welcoming studio environment. Ideal for those intending on applying to art schools, the course is structured to help you choose an area of art and design to study, and has a track record of getting students places at top art schools across the UK. Visit the Study pages on the GSA website for more information on the course and how to apply.

Postgraduate Degree Show 2025 29 Aug-7 Sep

Just a few weeks after Degree Show, you can explore a showcase of work from students on Postgraduate programmes across the GSA. You’ll find innovations in design and technology alongside explorations in sculpture, painting, printmaking and fashion. And just like the undergraduate Degree Show, there is an online showcase which gives you the chance to experience the show beyond exhibition spaces. Visit gsapostgradshowcase.net for more information.

Switch Track, Victoria Morton 28 Jun-9 Aug, Reid Gallery, Reid Building, 164 Renfrew Street, Mon-Sat 10-4.30pm

Switch Track is a survey show of selected works from 1995–2025. This period represents 30 years of painting since Victoria Morton graduated from the Master of Fine Art programme at The Glasgow School of Art in 1995. Morton lives and works between Glasgow, Scotland, and Fossombrone, Italy. She studied painting and mixed media at the GSA from 1989 to 1995. Morton’s practice has encompassed painting, sculptural assemblages, photography, and sound. Her paintings vary in scale, opacity, colour and spatiality, each distinctly painted composition has been developed with a degree of intricacy and intuition. Influenced by musical composition, colour perception, everyday life alongside personal narratives, historical and cultural references, Morton’s works explore a continuously unfolding visual, spatial and psychological experience.

CATALOGUE: 25 years of Centre for Advanced Textiles at GSA

13 Sep-18 Oct, Garnethill Gallery, Reid Building, 164 Renfrew Street

This retrospective exhibition explores the groundbreaking innovation and lasting contribution to the textile industry embedded in the 25-year history of the Centre for Advanced Textiles (CAT) at The Glasgow School of Art. The exhibition will present a diverse and captivating overview of work from key moments of CAT’s 25-year history. The Centre provides a pioneering educational and commercial digital fabric printing and textile design service, consulting with students and staff at the GSA as well as high profile commercial clients and members of the public. The chosen works exemplify how CAT’s expert team has collaborated with clients to push the boundaries of digital textile manufacturing.

Damian Barr: The Two Roberts Author Talk 9 Sep, 7pm, Reid Building, 164 Renfrew Street

The Two Roberts is a love letter to Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, two near-forgotten stars of the 1930s art scene who met at The Glasgow School of Art. Barr will deliver a talk about the creation of the book, and his process of drawing on real lives to recreate the past. Stunningly reimagined, The Two Roberts is a profoundly moving story of devotion and obsession, art and class. It is a love letter to MacBryde and Colquhoun, the almost-forgotten artists who tried to change the way the world sees – and paid a devastating price. Event in association with Waterstones.

SurvØY: an artist survey of an island, Saoirse Hi ins and Jonathan Ford 20 Sep-1 Nov, Reid Gallery, Reid Building, 164 Renfrew Street, (MonSat 10-4.30pm)

SurvØY is a four-year Creative Scotland-funded project developed as a contemporary artist ‘island almanac’, surveying and monitoring varying scales of change in the context of the island environment of Papa Westray, one of the Orkney islands. In particular, the exhibition focuses on multiple viewpoints for resilient, caring, adaptive systems, providing a model benchmark to measure against for future generation islanders, islands and communities in times of rapid environmental change.

War and Pieces of a Garden, Ian Hamilton Finlay 1-22 Nov, Garnethill Gallery, Reid Building, 164 Renfrew Street

This exhibition in the Garnethill Gallery marks the centenary of celebrated Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006). Finlay is internationally recognised as a poet, writer, visual artist and gardener, and is best known for the garden Little Sparta, set in the windswept Pentland Hills of southern Scotland. The exhibition draws upon works from GSA Library Special Collections, alongside a number of prints and photographs from Finlay’s friends and collaborators.

Open Studio Summer Courses

Courses running throughout summer

The Glasgow School of Art’s Open Studio offers a range of creative short courses for both adults and young people. Courses for Young Creatives (7-15 years old) will run in week-long blocks between 28 July and 4 August, with classes bookable in morning or afternoon groups each day of the week. Young people can get to learn about what they like within art while picking up some skills in a range of areas like photography, creative sculpture and ceramics, graphic design and 2D and 3D making. This year’s summer courses for adults are ideal if you’re looking to hone a new skill or develop your practice within a specialist area. Courses include painting, wood carving, sculpture, graphic design, and jewellery.

Race, Rights & Sovereignty

Established as a partnership between GSA’s Students’ Association (GSASA) and GSA Exhibitions, this public event series explores the relationship between race, place and creative practice. Events in the last year have included public lectures and artist-led talks, events and performances with Marline Smith, Camara Taylor, Alycia Pirmohamed, and Lisa Williams. Race, Rights and Sovereignty is currently programmed by artist, curator and researcher Beulah Ezeugo.

Sonica Sep 2026

For the last iteration of the festival in 2024, the GSA hosted a talks with renowned artists Robert Henke and Martin Messier. Henke’s work draws together the worlds of art and engineering to create audio visual installations; whilst Messier creates works in which sound meets images and objects in the form of performances and installations."

GSA OPEN

Whether you’re just starting to consider coming to art school, or you’re almost ready to hit ‘send’ on your application, GSA OPEN offers events to support you at whatever stage you are on your application journey. Our year-long programme encompasses campus open house events, student-led campus tours, portfolio advice sessions and one-to-one sessions with staff. Find out more on the GSA website.