Interim

Antonia Banados, Cat Meighan, Kate Livingston, Kirsty Macleod, Paul Quast, Phoebe Mitchell, Santiago Paulos, Susana Wessling, Stephen Fuller, Dave Molnar, Fraser Salter, Gezi Yao, Matthew Poland, Xuerong Yin, Abigail Smith, Anna Oberfeld, Daniel Lamb, Fu Le Chao, Malcolm O’Connell, Joan Stack, Ya Chin LI, Carolyn Sutton, Heather Lee Ann Evans, Emma Potteril

What happens in the intervening time? After it has all started and before it all ends.

What happens when after months of making visual work you realise you can sing? What happens when your student debt walks in – a life-sized sculptural lump – demanding your space, or those polystyrene things you get in packaging appear in glass? What happens when you make your own batteries from coins or commandeer NASA equipment to send messages into space? When you flat pack your work: when you stack it, when you fold it, bend it and staple it to a wall? What happens when you realise that your medium is retrograde, repeating the same things over and over and over and over again? What happens when you need medication or at least time to curl into a small ball in the darkness? What happens when your life takes place in empty grey halls? And did you ever stop to think about international politics through the symbolic and actual trade of pandas? Do you see the world like a painting or does the painting see you? What happens when you paint on dust sheets instead of canvases? Make an allegory of death?

Why not start a band? Why not take a breath and compare the indentations in a wooden groove with the leaden line pressed into your skin? Get your plinths, your paper clips and your bolts laser cut? Take photographs of Dick Turpin? Take photographs without a camera? What happens when you make plants out of steel and show them videos of floating flora?

This is what happens in the intervening time.

'Interim' is a two day exhibition at the University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery, featuring work by first year students from the MFA/MA Contemporary Art Practice course at Edinburgh College of Art. Realised through a dialogue between students and gallery curators, it provides an overview of postgraduate studio practice as it is being developed. Accompanied by a parallel publication by first year theory students called Grab a Chair.