Each summer, London’s art schools open their doors for graduation shows. For graduating artists, these exhibitions offer a chance to introduce their work, build relationships and step beyond the studio. For gallerists and collectors, they are an opportunity to discover new talent. For ArtULTRA, they offer an insight into how the next generation of artists understands the world and shares that understanding with us.

From June to September, our visits to the 2026 shows took us across London, from the Slade and Goldsmiths to Chelsea, Camberwell and Central Saint Martins, as well as the Royal College of Art and City & Guilds. Across the undergraduate and postgraduate exhibitions we visited, artists invited us to take part, slow down and reconsider familiar surroundings. Questions of connection and belonging ran through much of the work, often expressed through installations that brought together different media.

Participation and connection

What stood out in this year’s shows was the role given to the viewer. Many works depended on a physical encounter: visitors set something in motion, moved through an installation or became part of it simply by being there.

At the Slade, Flora Hunt’s The World Turned Upside Down (included below alongside following mentioned works) invited viewers to lie beneath a circular film projection showing people running in a continuous circle. The position of the viewer’s body changed the experience of watching, drawing us into the movement overhead.

At Central Saint Martins, Eddie Jack Trigg’s Desire Lines, featured a network of red strings and pulleys through the exhibition space, above other artists’ works. Pulling the strings caused a pencil to mark a single sheet of paper, bringing visitors’ separate actions together on one surface. The tension between this sprawling mechanism and its small, shared trace suggested a complex world seemingly pulling in competing directions but also coming together. It raised a question about collective action: how do our individual efforts connect, and what do they amount to?

Making room for reflection

Alongside works that asked us to act were others that encouraged a slower kind of attention. Glara Shim’s They Don’t Belong To Me Anymore used the architecture of the exhibition space to suspend fabric like the floating pages of a book. Visitors could move among these pages, experiencing the work as they walked through the room. The installation made space for reflection through a simple change in how we encountered it.

A similar invitation to pause emerged in John Huw Davies’s Equaliser 12. Acoustically treated painted panels were paired with a quadraphonic composition for clarinet and wind chimes. Painting and sound formed a single environment, in which colour and gesture met the resonance of the music. The interplay of consonance and dissonance gave the work a meditative quality without removing its tensions.

Home and instability

At the Royal College of Art, several installations created environments whose component parts seemed to exist in an uneasy balance. In the sculpture show, Sani Sani’s Gida Ya Rikice assembled salvaged timber, dismantled domestic furniture and sculptural fragments in varied cuts and finishes. The resulting interior appeared suspended between collapse and reconstruction. Home emerged as something continually remade through movement, memory, labour and survival.

This uncertainty also shaped Theo Rumsby’s Subsurface at Camberwell. Beginning with an altered image of a house, Rumsby used screen printing on paper and plaster, with plaster fragments scattered across the walls of the crypt in which the work was displayed. A familiar symbol of safety and identity became fragmented and unsettled. Considered alongside Sani’s installation, the work prompted us to consider how fragile a sense of home can be, and how closely belonging is tied to the spaces and materials around us.

Images beyond the photograph

Rumsby’s work also reflected a wider interest in moving photographic images into other materials. At Central Saint Martins, Delfin Uslu combined photo-silkscreen with coffee, Diet Coke, oil, thread and dyed cotton. The image acquired texture and layers, inviting attention to its physical surface as well as to what it depicted.

These experiments, like Davies’s combination of painting and sound, questioned where one medium ends and another begins. Artists allowed materials, space and the viewer’s presence to shape the work itself.

Seeing the world through the eyes of artists

What stayed with us after this year’s shows was the way these artists made their questions tangible. A pull on a string connected one person’s action to another’s. Fragments of a house unsettled the promise of shelter. Suspended fabric and resonating sound enabled us to feel our surroundings. Through these encounters, ideas about connection, uncertainty and belonging became explicit experiences we could share.

The artists we encountered created work that reflected the pressures and uncertainties of the world we face. They invited us to see familiar things differently, exposing the tensions within their work, asking us to consider our own place in what comes next. By drawing us into a personal encounter, they made space for connection and pause, leaving us with questions to carry into the world beyond the exhibition.