6/15/2014

Student work lost in Glasgow School of Art fire is reimagined in digital show

A crane lifts charred debris from the roof of Glasgow School of Art. Windows on the building's ruinous west side, their glass gone, reveal the burnt-out studios within. It is a scene of devastation.

But, in a gallery a few steps away, the courage and creativity of students whose biggest moment was wrecked by the fire that rampaged through Charles Rennie Mackintosh's great building last month makes for what must be the most moving of this summer's graduate exhibitions.

This is not a normal degree show. It cannot be. The School of Fine Art that was based in the Mackintosh building has put together what it calls a showcase for those of its students whose degree work was caught up in the fast spreading inferno.

Three weeks ago, these students were putting the final touches to an exhibition that is, traditionally and in previous years spectacularly, staged in studios, corridors and communal spaces of Mackintosh's elegant, imaginative temple of art.

"I was on my way to get some final bits of research bound when I got a call saying there was a fire," remembers Alex Kuusik. "The first thing I saw when I got back was black smoke coming out of studio 44 where my work was."

Kuusik lost his entire installation, which included a handmade suit patterned with scribbles that he had done when he was six and paintings based on the Dance of Death, Hans Holbein's woodcuts – "16th century pop art". Kuusik's one surviving canvas has severe smoke damage and he has been told it is beyond full recovery.

"Everyone went to the pub that night and it felt like a wake," he recalls. "The pub played Light My Fire which I thought was a bit early!"

Yet three weeks on, Kuusik's ideas live again. In the School of Fine Art show at the MacLellan Galleries, he is showing a photograph he took of his installation. Holbein's deathly image mixes with his scribbles and clothes in an impressive conceptual entertainment.

It is hard to overstate the importance of the degree show at the end of a student's course. The show is crucial to the degree itself and is a platform for students to launch themselves into a wider world: a successful exhibit can be the start of something big.

Painter Jenny Saville, for instance, sold out her Glasgow degree show and has never looked back. So it is a massive blow for this year's graduating students to have lost their work, and the touching, fascinating exhibition they have mounted is a noble attempt to salvage something from the wreckage.

Every student who was to have been in the ill-fated show in the Mack – as students call it – has submitted a single digital print for the Showcase exhibition.

Next to Kuusik's picture of his lost work, Heather-Mae Lancaster shows a photograph of an old toy; other prints, which are all the same size and are exhibited in rows, range from photos of paintings to landscape views and portraits.

Each image encapsulates the student's work as they want to sum it up. The photographs are like visual haikus. For what it has lost in sprawl, the show makes up with intensity.

It was the only fair and representative solution, says Alistair Payne, who heads the School of Fine Art, after the students' work was seared by fire and soaked by hoses.

"The students were struggling emotionally and some of them lost everything," says Payne. He had the idea of asking each of them for a single digital image, and, from inception to hanging, this show has taken 10 days to put together.

It wasn't only the students who lost their artwork. Payne and Mick McGraw, both artists, who run the department had their offices and studios on the top floor. "Mick and I have lost all our work." McGraw lost his slides of his work going back to his own student days at Glasgow School of Art.

Yet they put the students first and insist it was the common sense of the students in carrying out a "perfect" evacuation that meant the fire brigade could concentrate on saving what it could of the building, instead of having to rescue anyone.

The most radical work in the exhibition is a completely white image to which is affixed a white fisherman's fly. It sums up the sense that everyone here has to start again from scratch.

Alexander Haukrogh Jensen's blank and vanishing artwork conveys a dramatic sense of loss and possibility. Maybe you have to lose everything to get a new vision? Yet this idea was not a response to the fire. His planned installation was a 12ft wide white wall with a white fishing fly on it. Cleverly, he decided to submit a miniature version of his bold idea for the revised show.

"I had just left the building to get some paper," he tells me. "I came back around the corner and saw thick black smoke coming exactly from where my work was set up."

Yet, by the same boldness that would surely have made his huge white wall a hit at the degree show that was never to be, he is now the star of this showcase. You can't get sharper than whiteness.

In a surreal twist, Jensen has also lost his home. The roof of his tenement has collapsed. He can't go in to get his passport so he can't go home to Denmark. He doesn't seem too worried, though. He's living light and preparing new work. That's artists for you.

(Source: TheGuardian)

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