Edinburgh College of Art Graduate Show 2026 review: 'thought and craft'
This year’s ECA degree show sees skills and imagination combined with impressive results, writes Susan Mansfield
ECA Graduate Show 2026, Edinburgh College of Art ★★★★
There are some impressive installations at this year’s Edinburgh College of Art Degree Show, which features the work of some 90 students across Fine Art. Mieke Shaw explores her relationship with Catholicism in a show which is both confident and delicate: praying hands sculptures made from ice and wine melt slowly in hand-made bowls; two pew-ends are joined using hair and sewing needles.
Susanna Sergison employs the language of another of the great institutions of our day, IKEA, in a series of sculptures she calls The Uncanny Everyday. Furniture parts and household objects are combined with latex fabric from hosiery, pins and hair to explore some emotions from the heart of domestic life, finished with her own sardonic IKEA-style labels.
Matilde Melodia uses the forms of her own body when exercising to create paintings, an alphabet and wellbeing-themed games. Rumeng Chen’s Almost Human is an epic sculpture in miniature, in which some 200 hand-made humanoid figures emerge onto a red carpet and gradually become an ordered phalanx.
There is some fine painting here. Large groups of people are hard to capture, but Amelia Hopkinson’s big painting of the interior of a Paris jazz club is a clear highlight. Sophie Rehman has developed her own distinctive artistic language for exploring her experience in relation to both gender and race.
Natasha Kawalek’s paintings come from her investigation into her family’s history, the deportation of her grandfather’s family from their Polish village to the gulag. Vitto (Vittoria) Ginevri’s paintings are about memories of a family home in Rome. She doesn’t illustrate, but captures something of what memories feel like.
Finley Yates is a confident painter whose work takes a quirky look at masculinity using bold forms and plenty of colour. Bess(ie) Schofield has also developed a mature and confident language for her figurative work. Carol Jourdan makes intriguing abstracts with dyes she has made from foraged materials.
Lyndsay McColl and Haoyue Xu have both painted in a large scale on fabric, with impressive results. Azli Gumusgoz’s painting of water is on paper not fabric, but the scale and ambition of it is arresting and, as a keen surfer, she knows her subject well. At the other end of the scale, don’t miss Lily Leaver’s small but exquisite printmaking.
Natasha Faulkner’s pieces – paintings and objects made of clay – are small but very carefully considered, reaching for a language in which to talk about female experience which isn’t filtered through the male gaze. Sienna Ponting, by contrast, puts the male gaze in the spotlight, vividly depicting young women being leered at by groups of men.
There is not much large sculpture here, but Ella Crawford’s work – large metal frames linked by printed fabric, a little like giant deck chairs – are well made and effective, as, in a more subtle way, are Sarah Graham’s works made with wood.
There isn’t a great deal of film either, but it’s worth spending some time in Selenay Tektunali’s photobooth, where she critiques the recently introduced Schengen rules for travellers through the persona of a manic TikTokker.
Photographer Ed Puddington uses his own body to draw attention to the unlawful killing of birds of prey, and Quinn Jenkins creates an entire imagined world with a cast of puppet-like characters. We see them in doll’s house style sculptures, in a book, and also in paintings. That, in a nutshell, is what a degree show is like: issues and stories, thought and craft, and imagination turned all the way up.
The Edinburgh College of Art Degree Show 2026 runs until 5 June.
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