Catherine Marshall checks the pulse of this year’s graduates of distinction and finds their communication skills well honed.
Graduate shows are as interesting for the failures of ambition that they reveal as for their undoubted successes. If you can’t experiment when you are a student, when can you do so? Yet this is a risky approach for an aspiring graduate. There is a thin line between innovation and failure, not because the ambition is not itself worthy or the student capable of pulling it off, but because of the time constraints that a degree course demands. At the stage most undergraduates are at, knowing when something is simply too complex to pursue in the time allowed requires a level of maturity that many young people don’t have. Yet we need those ambitions and we need them all the more because, successful or otherwise, the artworks in graduate shows tell us what a generation of artists is thinking and what they are being taught.
‘Culture is about sharing; Nationalism is about ownership.’ Hughie O’Donoghue encapsulates the chasm between the two concepts, in conversation with Brian McAvera
The study of fragments is second nature to Jason Ellis, writes Paula Murphy of the sculptor’s collection from last year.
As Irish Design 2015 is launched worldwide, we republish here Jennifer Goff’s assessment of the legacy of internationally acclaimed arch Modernist Eileen Gray