News and Features

First Prize was awarded to third year BMus student Sarah Smith who wins £500 and their article published in The Skinny magazine.   
 

Sarah Smith, a third year BMus student, scooped the first prize in the inugural Critical Writing Prize for this essay on 2020 BMus Music graduate Rowan McIlvride. Sarah wins £500 and her article will be published in the October edition of The Skinny magazine.

Tabby Carless-Frost, a 2020 MA History of Art and English graduate, was awarded second place in the inugural Critical Writing Prize for her essay on the work of Sculpture graduate Lorenzo Rangoni Robertson. Tabby wins £300. 

Molly Evans, who is currently completing her MSc programme in History of Art, Theory & Display was awarded third place in the inugural Critical Writing Prize for her essay ‘Rebecca Habgood’s Matter’. Molly wins £200. 

Curator, researcher and writer Tiffany Boyle, from Mother Tongue, writes about the work of graduates Róisín Gallagher and Hannah Lim.

Róisín Gallagher was awarded the John Byrne Award for the second quarter of 2020, receiving £500 for her video entry 'Bad English'. 

The performances formed part of ECA's online celebration of the work of our 2020 Masters students. 

I sought to sonically reimagine Charlie Chaplin’s seminal 1917 short film The Immigrant by crafting an enveloping and ever-changing cerebral soundscape.

I wanted to visualise the amount of human energy, care and handling that goes into the making of any garment.

Breaking The Fall is a trilogy of experimental documentaries exploring everyday experiences of illness and care.

Friendly User is a culmination of an original quantitative study and artistic research investigating the experience of visitors in department stores and art museums with staff.

Arts journalist Anahit Behrooz explores the work of BA (Hons) Photography graduate Aayushi Gupta.

Lauren Dyer Amazeen - art critic, writer, lecturer, tutor, independent producer - looks at the work of Art, Space & Nature graduate Harmony Bury.

Peter Amoore, artist and curatorial assistant at Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, Dundee, has chosen to write about the work of three of our new 2020 graduates.

Alice Strang, award-winning art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art, reviews the work of 2020 BA (Hons) Sculpture graduate Jess Hume. 

Work from five graduating students has been selected to become a permanent part of the University of Edinburgh’s Art Collection.

This year's graduating Fashion students have produced an Illustrated Catwalk in response to their physical show being cancelled because of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Ten graduate projects from across ESALA’s professional architecture and landscape architecture programmes have been published online as part of the influential and international architecture and design magazine Dezeen’s Virtual Design Festival.

ESALA staff and students collaborate on new catalogues celebrating the talent of this year's graduating cohort.

The winners are: Leah Holmes, BA (Hons) Fashion; Anna Kincaid, BA (Hons) Textiles; and Daniela Groza, BA (Hons) Jewellery & Silversmithing. Each wins £500.

We invite our 2020 graduates and all students across ECA to submit entries to the Critical Writing Prize, to be awarded at the end of the 2020 Show. Both ECA 2020 graduates and current ECA students, at all levels, are welcome to enter, including students on joint degrees.

My graduation project can be summed up as a collage of ideas; a continuation of previous and some new projects that serve as an investigation in the future of my practice, with an emphasis on projects I presented during my solo show.

This design process has been a personal exploration of my values as a designer and as a member of a broken society, which I hope comes across through the visual and written language used throughout.

I’ve managed to work across disciplines, utilizing the different facilities at Edinburgh College of Art to create a well-rounded and well-researched body of work.

By resembling my photography, green screen filming and 3D rendered files, I create mythical worlds with multi-facet concepts about environmental human interventions, hybrid figurative identities and references to classical paintings.

‘A Good Bye’ separates the whole mourning period into two parts: an interactive educational booklet about the funeral, and a schedule for people to go through the ceremony together.

The Astronomy Culture Centre is designed as an interior station where the public can engage with sky events and explore the world above with interactive galleries and simulation technology.

‘The Path of a Single Thread’ references the social and political histories of lace manufacturing in the East Midlands, specifically those surrounding class and gender politics.

My final project is a picture book telling the forgotten story of Bessica Raiche, an early female aviator who built a biplane in her living room in 1910.

The narrative of our graduation project MAGIC ISN’T WORKING centres around a dog called Charles Saatchi, and his plans to throw a rave in his eponymous gallery.

As a person of mixed Singaporean and British heritage both my research and practice has come to engage with the colonial connotations of the relationship between the East and the West.

Most of my portfolio is based around commercial projects. I have always leaned towards this kind of work because I want my design to have a place outside of art school and in the real world.

My graduation project ‘The Journey to Happiness’ explores a range of solutions informed by my research into the achievement of happiness and addresses everyone who wants to improve their quality of life.

Jewellery is not just about aesthetics; it’s also about spreading important messages about diversity and environmental engagement.

Using self-generated, 3D models I hope to ‘unfreeze’ the fixed identity and meaning of historical works, by reanimating these classical artefacts in the present.

My costume designs combine 16th-century silhouettes with classic 1980s streetwear; bodices become shell suit jackets, trunk hose become tracksuit bottoms and bum rolls are transformed into bum bags.

My project investigates the potential of high-density residential districts as a vehicle for enhancing under-threat high streets and town centres in the UK. 

The project moves through a wide variety of scales and ways of exploring, designing, and rejuvenating landscapes that have become forgotten or redundant.

My goal was to explore how I could use visual language as a tool to educate, empower and eradicate stigma, with a particular focus on changing cultural perceptions of menstruation in the UK. This manifested through a range of prints, editorial illustrations and zines, as well as a larger graphic novel project.

I always wanted to make a short film that combines my passion for the use of colour and composition. During my studies at ECA, I have always tried to incorporate my illustration style into my animation work and I believe I achieved it with "One Way".

Drawing on a darkly comedic, democratic and socially conscious ethos, my multidisciplinary practice, spanning sculpture, drawing and music, is an ongoing investigation into the evolution of cultural tribalism and the distortion of historic truth through myth and legend.

I started this project by drawing a life-sized model of a sheep... Thankfully, this evolved, and became a body of work that aims to consider the ways in which human occupation and more-than-human action can be integrated into the landscape stewardship and design of the Scottish Highlands.

(Un)doing Thresholds explores the porous conditions, temporalities and architectonic specificities of Naples, a place in which processes of “undoing” are - following Andrew Benjamin - understood to be vital to the formation of the city as constructive practices.

Much of my work is inspired by the beauty of the natural world, constantly photographing everything around me to influence my designs.

Most importantly I would like people to know that we need to be wary of the technologies that we heavily rely on. Although these technologies promise efficiency, security, and new assets, we need to be aware of their weaknesses.

Reclamation of the Exposition (2020) explores the commodification, fetishization and sexualisation of the black female body, specifically through the human displays in ethnographic expositions in the 18th and 19th centuries.