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New Print Generation

Edinburgh Printmakers exhibition featuring Rachel Maclean, Patrizio Belcampo and Lyndsay Gauld
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New Print Generation

Edinburgh Printmakers exhibition featuring Rachel Maclean, Patrizio Belcampo and Lyndsay Gauld

Just in time for Degree Show season, Edinburgh Printmakers has chosen to hold its own mini student exhibition – a selection of emerging graduates from the four major colleges who use printmaking techniques as the basis for their work.

As with every degree show, it’s a blend which shows great promise and baffling, sometimes unconvincing results, often from the same artist. The most striking and divisive selection on display has been created by Rachel Maclean, whose triptych ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ appears to be a grotesque commentary on celebrity culture and body fascism. Against a fairytale backdrop of pink castles and rainbows, hideous, acne-ridden female figures cavort in their skimpy clothes, one having apparently shed her fat former flesh. Maclean references Hieronymus Bosch in the text, but these seem more like pieces of garish and unsubtle satire than high art.

Elsewhere, Patrizio Belcampo shows four portrait pieces featuring well-known female British monarchs, which seem to aim at using their features and silhouettes almost as a form of stylised branding, an interesting but not entirely meaty concept. Similarly Lyndsay Gauld’s etchings are more aesthetically striking than conceptually robust, while Francesca Miller and Elizabeth Hardman’s pieces are actually appendices to event-based art happenings (in the latter case a bug-eating party, which sounds like an intriguing project as a whole). In Sarah Diver’s collage images, finally, there are layers of implied meaning and open interpretations from pleasing assemblages of vintage cuttings and retro iconography called things like ‘Fings Ain’t Wot’ and ‘Pure Dying On Fanta’.

Edinburgh Printmakers, until Sat 19 May

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