All is eerily quiet in the corridors of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art.
There is nothing to hear but the sound of the distant footstep of an external examiner or the odd buzz of noise from an installation left switched on in a darkened room. The building looks as though it has been deserted on some unspecified cue, and all that is left is a clutter of construction tools, cleaning equipment - and art. This is a college on the eve of its annual degree show, a Marie Celeste of hopes and dreams awaiting the scrutiny of an inquisitive public this weekend.
The last paintbrush, the last cleaning rag, the last screwdriver, was put down a week ago on the sum of these final-year students' four years of work. "There's nothing like a deadline to focus the mind," smiles Programme Director (Art & Media) Calum Colvin, later, telling me the best part about teaching is helping the students with the practical side of how to realise their ideas.
And the results are more than eclectic. If there is a Dundee aesthetic, it is one of interdisciplinarity, with many students' work encompassing anything from photography to sculpture, ceramics to animation. Among the stillness, there are a few flurries of activity. We walk through Architecture - still being assessed - and a student is on the floor, rearranging an intricate cardboard model of a futuristic-looking structure. Tower blocks, living compartments and billboards are passed in miniature, until we climb the stairs to Fine Art.
The doors open on numerous rooms, each white-walled, filled with two or three students' work. Sometimes a room is given over to one student alone, such as Lotte Fisher, whose miniature imagined world of compound mythical beasts comprises a wooden tunnel to an astro-turfed Lost World.
In another room, a perfectly formed, tactile giant plywood cylinder neatly encloses a space for sound. There is a room of shrouded beehives, the buzz echoing down the corridor; a cluster of yellow umbrellas next to a video of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests in 2014; a film projected onto mist.
There is a striving for clarity, for simplicity. Tanith Marron's 'performative journey' in a self-constructed plastic boat down Loch Long and up Schiehallion - dropping tiny paper boats as she ascended - is beautifully, sparely photographed, the practical lines of the small and rather vulnerable-looking boat in which she completed her pilgrimage suspended in mid-air in the gallery.
Art and Philosophy student Hollie Simpson's satisfying triangular forms protrude from organic globs, as simple forms reminiscent of reproducing bacteria conga across the surface of her meticulously hand-drawn animations.
Upstairs again, another pocket of activity. Annie Wynne is filling a chest freezer with water to re-make the ice struts and panes of two assemblages which she constructed for her degree show - a wooden chair temporarily held together with ice and a shelter with a melting window. "The chair seat did migrate a little," she tells me, cheerfully, pointing to a spot on the other side of the gallery to which the parts slid after crashing down.
There is something arresting in Wynne's fragile constructs. She works in the temporary and the fleeting, a "palette of flotsam and jetsam". Too fleeting, it turned out, when she lost her camera, the only record of recent ephemeral works made in the landscape, shortly before her degree show. "There was some panic," says Colvin, "but she's so productive that when we looked at what she still had, there was enough good work there for two or three degree shows."
We move on, passing dead crows and psychedelia, formal portraits and abstract landscapes. In one room, a giant wooden pylon twists and droops towards the floor, an increasingly oppressive soundtrack of electromagnetic fuzz blistering and bleeding into the space. The artist, David Mackay, speaking to me the following day from a beer garden where he is celebrating his results, tells me the genesis of the idea came from "the experience of being constantly bombarded with loads of information from multiple sources". Mackay wanted a symbol that was "impotent, flaccid", and picked up on the pylon as the figurehead for the power grid, "the lifeblood allowing us to live in this information-saturated age".
He passes the phone to a fellow student, Koren Heydon-Dumbleton, whose confident installation of body-like meat-bags - if she will forgive the description - hang suspended from a climbing frame in another gallery space. Disturbing, ambiguous, they are neither animal nor human, but somewhere uncomfortably between the two. Her work references abattoirs, children's playgrounds and the theatre of violence. "I just want to continue making," she says, telling me she hopes to move to Glasgow. "I'm waiting to see if the degree show offers anything."
"You never know who will come round," agrees Mackay, shortly off to Florence having won the prestigious RSA Kinross Scholarship. "Opportunities do come out of the strangest places," says Hollie Simpson. "You always need to have something on the go."
We wander past a basement rage of films, flickering; a thousand shells strung onto a line hung in the stairwell; a cluster of animation students in the corridor waiting for the end of their assessments - and find ourselves suddenly back on the street. So, too, are this year's batch of students. A sudden ejection, but an inevitable one.
"We strive to teach them about being out in the real world, about being artists," says Colvin. "We want them to be professional, but they are art students - and thank god! That's the great thing about them."
Art, Design and Architecture Degree Show 2015, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee (www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad, 01382 388 828) until May 31, Mon-Fri, 10am-8pm; Sat-Sun, 10am-4pm
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