New generation is profoundly talented

New Contemporaries showcases the best new talent from Scotland’s five art colleges and schools of architecture, with 66 emerging artists and architects chosen, respectively, by the conveners Delia Baillie and Charlie Hussey.

Baillie has chosen well. The number of artists representing each art school is proportionate to final class sizes. So whereas Glasgow School of Art has 19 artists, Moray School of Art has only two — Kirsty Wallace and Penny Rees. Wallace’s eye-catching installation, Shelter, is a re-imagining of a traditional travellers’ gellie or shelter, fashioned from hazel wood and covered in sheets of felted wool. Although not unique, it does signal the upsurge in interest in traditional crafts, ethnography and culture.

A wide variety of media is on display here and this breadth is surely one of the great strengths of the current generation of artist-makers. An example of this is Elizavet Christodoulou’s paintings and her ceramic installation Heads of Noble Soldiers, which shows the real impact of conflict on the human body.

Alison Wright describes her photographic portraits as “capturing a pivotal moment between awareness and self-consciousness”, and here she has concentrated on portraits that are a strong rebuttal of the selfie.

Her lens blurs the line between intrusion and observation. In her triptych Daphne, a highly enlarged close-up, the subject is presented with unflinching scrutiny. Each freckle, spot and pore is visible; yet what we see is neither ugliness nor “flaw” but beauty in imperfection.

The majority of works here are of a high quality, so much so that it seems almost iniquitous to single out examples. That said, Natalie Howlett’s sardonic but serious installations on the theme of healthcare are a valuable contribution to the current debate and Grace Woodcock, also from Edinburgh College of Art, delivers complex abstract imagery in a mixed media format.

Despite some unnecessarily obscure and convoluted language used to describe these artists’ practices and the over-crowded feel of this show — surely there’s a case for slimming down the numbers from 66 to about 40 — there’s no doubt that the next generation of artists is professional, and profound.

Until March 15