Gray's School of Art Aberdeen

14/09/2026

Final day of the Master’s Degree Show 2026

One last chance to spend time with this year’s postgraduate work at Gray’s.

Across the School, 27 artists and designers have transformed studios into spaces for painting, installation, photography, print, material experimentation and research. Together, the exhibition reflects a year of testing ideas, following questions and developing practices that are still moving beyond the degree show itself.

If you have not made it along yet, today is the day. Come back for another look, find something you missed, or join us this evening as we bring the 2026 Master’s Degree Show to a close.

📍 Gray’s School of Art
🗓 Today, Monday 14 September
🥂 Closing event, 5pm to 9pm

Free and open to everyone. 🤍

📸 Nicole Paterson

14/09/2026

Today, Monday 14 September, is your final chance to visit Gray’s School of Art Master’s Degree Show 2026 and Curtain Call, our Graduates in Residence exhibition. Join us for the closing event tonight from 5 to 9 pm.

There are details worth spending time with: stitched surfaces, layered photographs, expressive drawings and textured jewellery. Sculptural forms stretch across the floor, while prints bring colour, repetition and humour to the walls.

Our Master’s artists and designers share the outcomes of their postgraduate research and experimentation. Our Graduates in Residence mark a year of developing their practices, exchanging ideas and exploring what comes after student life.

📍 Gray’s School of Art
📅 Today, Monday 14 September
🕰 Daytime viewing: 10 am to 5 pm
🎭 Closing event: 5 to 9 pm

Find Curtain Call in GC01 and GC08, with Freelands Studio Fellow Alice Corile’s main works in GC02, all on the top floor.

Come for a closer look and help us celebrate the artists and designers behind both exhibitions. Everyone is welcome.

12/09/2026

Lauryn King’s MA Communication Design practice begins with a domestic archive of family recipes and dieting material from the 1970s. She brings these sources into conversation to consider the uneasy closeness of nurture and restriction, and the cultural ideals that shape women’s relationships with food, femininity and their bodies.

The installation takes the form of a familiar kitchen and dining space. A laid table, mint green chairs, retro crockery and an orange fridge sit alongside printed matter, a screen printed cotton apron and a film shown on a CRT television. Posters, pamphlets, a shopping list and recipe cards borrow the visual language of commercial advertising. Their bright colours and satirical instructions draw attention to how messages about dieting and gendered domestic roles can become embedded in everyday life.

Lauryn’s multidisciplinary approach moves between graphic design, sewing, risograph printing, bookbinding and moving image. Her book, All the Best, combines archival photography on its cover with photographs Lauryn took while baking the recipes with her mum and sisters. The book uses paper her grandad had kept since the 1990s, placing family memory within both its content and material form. These personal records sit alongside the branded language of Outline, bringing shared acts of cooking into contact with messages about dieting and femininity.

The wider Master’s Degree Show brings Lauryn’s practice into conversation with distinct postgraduate perspectives and different relationships between research, process and material form.

See Lauryn’s work at Gray’s School of Art Master’s Degree Show, open 7 to 14 September 2026.

Closing event: Monday 14 September, 5pm to 9pm.

📸 Images 11-14 by Nicole Paterson
King.Design

10/09/2026

Jo Middelthon Joanna Middelthon asks what decay can make visible about loss, repair and renewal. Her MA Fine Art practice moves between painting and sculpture.

Jo works with hessian, plaster, canvas, acrylic paint, brown paper, ceramic, soil and fragments from a house renovation. Surfaces hang, fold and gather across the installation. Seams, tears, stains and crumbling edges remain exposed. Irregular forms occupy a low white plinth, while larger wall works move between image, object and support.

Material change is not simply represented. It is allowed to take place. Jo cultivates mould and buries canvases in the ground, where fungi, insects and soil leave traces that cannot be fully controlled. This materially led process has taken the work from two dimensions into tactile sculptural forms. These gestures connect physical transformation to memory, time and identity. They also hold preservation and decline in tension, asking how far repair can go before the character of an object is altered.

Jo’s enquiry sits alongside distinct practices by postgraduate artists, designers, makers and researchers in the wider Master’s Degree Show. Their proximity creates conversations between different approaches to material, process and research.

See Jo’s work at Gray’s School of Art from 7 to 14 September 2026.

Closing event Monday 14 September 5pm to 9pm

📸 Images 8-12 by Nicole Paterson

09/09/2026

What might purgatory look like if it were not simply a place of punishment? This question guides MA Fine Art student Saffron Cunningham’s installation of three paintings: Hitherto, The Hour and Tempest.

Painted in acrylic and gouache on paper, Saffron’s empty interiors unfold at a scale that approaches architecture. Doorways, staircases, broken balustrades and areas of encroaching growth suggest spaces left in an uncertain state. With no visible occupants, viewers are free to consider what may have happened and where each route could lead.

Video games inform how Saffron imagines movement through these painted worlds. The works are suspended in the centre of the gallery rather than fixed to a wall. Visitors can move between and around them, encountering shifting sightlines, red lettered passages on the reverse surfaces and the physical curve of the paper. Sound also informs the installation, encouraging visitors to slow down and attend to smaller details. A setting that first appears damaged or abandoned can become a quiet place in which to pause.

Saffron’s installation joins a wider exhibition of distinct postgraduate practices, where individual relationships between material, research and display meet within a shared space.

Encounter the work at Gray’s School of Art Master’s Degree Show, open 7 to 14 September 2026.

Closing event: Monday 14 September, 5pm to 9pm.

📸 Images 9-17 by Nicole Paterson

Saffron Cunningham

08/09/2026

08/09/2026

Gray's School of Art Master's Degree Show 2026 is open, bringing together work by 27 graduating and continuing postgraduate artists and designers.

Part two continues our introduction to the exhibition through catalogue images from eight of the artists and designers taking part. Their practices span painting, communication design, photography, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, collage, installation, archival materials and handmade charcoal.

Their work considers shared social spaces in decline, memory and the unconscious, inherited expectations surrounding food, bodies and femininity, q***r identity, friendship and imagined worlds, rural labour and ecological relationships. A satirical communication design project examines historical fascist iconography and the persistence of authoritarian visual culture. Other works explore material experimentation, communication and anonymity, alongside the ways designed environments mediate our relationships with nature and wellbeing.

Together, parts one and two introduce all 27 postgraduate artists and designers represented in this year’s exhibition catalogue.

Each image is drawn from the catalogue. Read the full artist statements through the link in the comments, then visit to experience the scale, surfaces and relationships between the works in person.

Featuring work by Saffron Cunningham, Alexander Easton, Jorja Ellington, Lauryn King, Eleanor Cheetham, Abbie McEwan, Sakkeid and Sarah Sanger.

Also on view is Curtain Call, the final exhibition by Gray’s 2025 to 2026 Graduates in Residence on the top floor.

Gray’s School of Art Master’s Degree Show 2026
7 to 14 September
First floor, Gray’s School of Art, Garthdee Road, Aberdeen

07/09/2026

Gray's School of Art Master's Degree Show 2026 is now open, bringing together work by 27 graduating and continuing postgraduate artists and designers.

Part one shares catalogue images from 19 of the artists and designers taking part. Their practices move through painting, drawing, printmaking, fashion and textiles, ceramics, sculpture, installation, moving image, publication design, radio, soft robotics and technology. They work with reclaimed, natural, digital and living materials.

The work explores memory, identity, care, perception, place and community. It asks how materials can be transformed, how ecological responsibility can shape making and how technology changes the ways we see, listen and create.

These catalogue images propose an introduction to what visitors will encounter throughout the show. Read the full catalogue through the link in the comments to learn more about each practice, then experience, the scale, material detail and relationships between the works in person.

Featuring work by Dawn-Marie Farmer, Nicole Hopley, Adulphina Imuede, Bronwyn Mackenzie, Nicole Mackintosh, Sophie Mancellon, Gabby Morris, Diana P. Ansino, Jakob Rusin, Hannah Smith, Anastasiia Zyrianova, Rowan Flint, Paul Irvine, Lara Stewart, Lauren Strachan, Jo Middelthon, Lesley Dyker, Jacquie Shortland and Erin Williams.

Also showing alongside the Master’s Degree Show is Curtain Call, the final exhibition by Gray’s 2025 to 2026 Graduates in Residence on the top floor.

Gray’s School of Art Master’s Degree Show 2026
7 to 14 September
First Floor, Gray’s School of Art, Garthdee Road, Aberdeen

Part two follows soon.

05/09/2026

The final call is here.

Earlier this year, The Midst presented Gray’s 2025 to 2026 Graduates in Residence midway through their residency. Ideas that had been lost amid assessments and deadlines were being revisited, with time ahead to experiment, refine their processes and build confidence.

Now, after 12 months of new experiences, opportunities, artistic discussion, learning and unlearning, the GiRs take their final bow with Curtain Call.

Brought together through a team effort, Curtain Call brings individual practices into a shared exhibition spanning digital design, photography, oil painting and installation. There is texture, colour and sound, with audiences invited to become part of their final show.

📍 Rooms GC01, GC02 and GC08, top floor, Gray’s School of Art
📅 7 to 14 September 2026
🕰 Monday 7 to Friday 11 September, 10 am to 7.30 pm
🕰 Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September, 10 am to 5 pm
🕰 Monday 14 September, 10 am to 5 pm
🎭 Closing event on Monday 14 September, 5 to 9 pm

Running alongside Gray’s School of Art Master’s Degree Show 2026. All welcome.

Exhibition coordinated by Arabella Sciallo
Exhibition text with contributions from Innes Gregory Innes
Poster design by Mia R. Arkless Mia R. Arkless Lisa Stewart Lisa Stewart and Amy Cowling .cowling_

03/09/2026

Gray’s is live from Dundee today 👀

Seven of our 2026 Fashion and Textile Design graduates are at V&A Dundee for Scotland Fashion Now: Graduate Showcase ’26, presenting selected looks from their collections on the runway tonight.

Hazel Gilroy
Angus Lallah
Eve Sinclair McNally
Catriona McLean
Ethan Brown
Hollymia Cockayne
Eilidh Fernando Campbell

Our Fashion and Textiles Course Leader, Colin and Technical Expert Joanna, are there supporting the graduates through today’s preparations and helping them get ready for the showcase.

Colin has also taken over our Instagram Stories and is already sharing what is happening inside V&A Dundee. Head to our Stories on Instagram at Gray’s School of Art Aberdeen now and follow the day as it unfolds, with more from the runway later. 📱

Want to experience it in person? There may still be time. Check V&A Dundee for any remaining tickets for tonight’s showcase, taking place from 18:00 to 22:30.

The photographs in this carousel take us back to EXPOSE, our Graduate Fashion Show at Gray’s in May. They capture the work around the runway: hair, makeup, dressing, final adjustments and the collective focus behind presenting each collection.

Photography: Scotland | UK | Destination Photographer

Hair and makeup:

Weronika Maciejczyk
Ashleigh Jennifer | MUA
C E C E B E A U T Y 💄
By Flo || Aberdeen Makeup Artist
Megan Evans/Stockford
ᴊᴇᴀɴ
Joel - stylist