Degree shows are a significant springboard for early-career artists. As the first major step towards a professional artistic practice, this is a pivotal moment to get discovered and an exciting time for ArtULTRA to scout and connect with fresh talent. In this review, we pull out the artists and projects  we found most remarkable this year.

To our surprise, we felt that this year's BA show at CSM was stronger than that of its MA counterpart. We were particularly impressed by Held In The Making, a curated room bringing together works by graduates whose practice focused on materiality and space. Wood works and wall displays have gained popularity across colleges this year in general, but we especially enjoyed the beautifully executed hanging and mounted wood carvings by Franklin Collins included in this section. An added bonus was that the audience was not only allowed, but encouraged to interact with Collins’s work, which had a distinctly tactile quality with the smooth finishes and beautifully carved hand imprints. This piece was in perfect synergy with other installations in the room, notably Miles Graham’s serene and playful still lifes, and Bobbie Rivers’s stunning mesh panels, Bedside II, 163. Other highlights from the CSM undergraduate show included Angel Dan Rong’s playful ceramic pigeons and Uma Dehaan’s oil painting, Fire/ Ribbons In The Living Room, exploring different forms of abstract mark-making.

Thanks to Mia Taylor, Course Leader of MA Art & Science we enjoyed a fascinating guided tour of the course’s showcase which cast the works in a completely new light. The technical complexity and innovation embedded in these installations, exploring the intersection of art and science in the broadest sense, were striking. Kentaro Ukumura’s carved wooden map, visualising how politics can warp scientific and cartographic inquiries, through the use of laser play, was especially compelling and timely. Misako Holly-Hayashi’s installation, Electrical Overstimulation, also left a strong impression on us. Winner of the Cass Art Award, the work employed innovative materials, including hair, metal, fabric, and cyanotype printing techniques, to offer a powerful glimpse into the neurodivergent mind.

This year, we’ve also seen a number of intricate, small format displays across colleges, in contrast to large-scale works which dominated previous shows. Among the highlights were Charlotte Winifred Guérard’s charming miniature paintings juxtaposed with her floor-to-ceiling textile installation displayed across two rooms at the RA Schools. The small paintings evoked vivid landscapes either captured in motion or retrieved as fragments from memory. Other standouts at the RA included Suleman Aqeel Khilji’s washed-out paintings of spectral figures and fleeting scenes, alongside James Sibley’s immersive multimedia installation which delved deep into both collective and personal memory through the use of familiar objects. The rest, sadly, we found underwhelming. 

Although the RA consistently sets a high bar this year’s presentation and the overall calibre of work, despite the few highlights, didn’t quite measure up to previous years.

Sculpture and installation were exceptionally strong at Slade and Goldsmiths. Ranging from delicate arrangements to life-sized wall mounts, we saw a variety of works experimenting with the sculptural potential of different materials. Shiying Song’s piece at the Slade, featuring small kneeling figures bearing a large wooden plank that nearly concealed them from view, immediately pulled us in to look more closely at what lay underneath. Similarly subtle yet affecting was Seonhee Jung’s installation of pastel paintings and delicately carved sculptural pieces which together created a quiet, meditative atmosphere. We were stunned by Varvara Uhlik’s mesmerising yet ominous Play Ground – an installation of metal slides and swings evoking the architecture of the post-soviet era, half-submerged and eerily reflected in a black pool of water flooding a room upstairs. At Goldsmiths, best in show was Amelia Akiko Frank’s beautiful multimedia installation. Her contrasting use of metal to sculpt a delicate floral form was clever, and the presentation of her various sketches alongside it illustrated the flourishing of the idea from initial concept to full-scale sculptural object.

At the RCA, Yoyojin’s playful installation Your Free Nation invited visitors to create their own nation (designing a flag, anthem, and constitution) with the assistance of AI, reflecting on our increasingly individualistic and fragmented world in which we exist as isolated islands. Also at the RCA,  the MA photography featured powerful projectsYvann Zahui immersive photographic installation, Yako,  named after the Ivorian expression offered to someone in pain as a gesture of solidarity, was a sensitive reflection on cultural rituals and identity. Leah McLaine’s intimate, unflinching portraits captured on medium-format, were equally captivating.

Each year a recurring symbol or theme emerges among the graduates’ work, across the various art schools. This time, horses were omnipresent! We saw them galloping across canvases (Lily Wei at the RCA and Hannah Naify at Slade), spinning on merry-go-rounds (Jane Mechner at the RCA), ambling along on moving image work (such as Charlotte Pachette’s piece at Goldsmiths) and sculpted into three-dimensional forms (Charlotte Miles at the RCA and Gala Hills at the Slade). Their recurring presence, across various media and formats, felt far from coincidental. Pointing towards a shared experience amongst graduates. Traditionally symbols of courage, in today's context they could be seen as embodying a desire to escape from what feels like the incessant pressures of life today. Yet, in the dynamic buzz of the art schools, these horses conveyed not just the desire to flee these challenges but quite the opposite - the readiness and freedom to face them head-on.