More than three months have passed since fire ripped through the interior of Glasgow School of Art's (GSA) Mackintosh Building.

Now, as the dust settles, slowly but surely, art school life is getting back to normal - a new term and a major restoration programme.

Last week, as scaffolding began to creep up its elegant exterior, there was a tangible feeling of 'business as usual' in the GSA air. The 2014 Graduate Degree Show, which opens today, features work by postgraduate students across a wide variety of disciplines, including architecture, design, fine art and digital. The show usually takes place in August but, because of the fire, it has been pushed back a few weeks.

This year, it has been split into two locations in Renfrew Street: the brand-spanking-new Reid Building and (in place of the Mack) the dowager-duchess-like McLellan Galleries, which was also used to host the Fine Art undergraduate degree show in June.

The McLellan Galleries is where you'll find 22 graduating students from the year-long MLitt in Fine Art Practice, 14 of whom were painting students based in the Mack. Their studios were at the opposite end of the building from Mackintosh's library, which suffered the brunt of fire damage. They might not have lost their work, but several have woven a personal response to the fire into their degree show presentation.

The most affecting has to be Theresa Malaney's life-size installation of the Mackintosh Building doors. Made using latex which was put on to the actual doors, they hang limply, still retaining the familiar features of shiny brass 'in' and 'out' fittings and portico windows supported by a typical Mackintosh 'stem' motif. Malaney's work is all about memory and its physical manifestation on the psyche. She uses everything from the woodworm in a wardrobe to the doors on her former marital home to recreate a feeling in physical form.

Cristina Garriga, has responded to the fire with a video work called My Bookcase. For this project, she is trying to locate books lost in the fire. Through filmed interviews with artists connected to the school, including Jacki Parry and David Harding, she sheds light on all sorts of stories. What is particularly striking is the way in which the interviewees are surprised at their own book memories.

Harding, former head of GSA's Environmental Art course (the one which produced a welter of Turner Prize winners), tells Garriga with typical clarity of thought: "There are always good things coming out of bad things ... Many publications will become more well-known ... The fire will have revealed new things, new perceptions."

The MLitt work sits well within the McLellan. There's a real sense of cohesion in this show, which tells you that much curatorial forethought has gone in to making it gel together. GSA has strong links with China, and some of the most striking work is from Chinese students. I particularly liked Yue Xu's delicate paintings on rice paper clamped into plexiglass and shown in an installation of light boxes.

In the central gallery, Zhehui Wu has installed a giant utility-coloured lotus, partly on the floor, partly on the wall. The floor section is festooned with a number of brightly coloured, hand-made felt creatures.

I also liked ex-teacher Edwina Bracken's two-part installation consisting of oil paintings hung on facing walls of the central gallery, together with two gallery-style benches covered in fabric with the same imagery as the paintings. I can see this catching on in interior design circles.

There is also some strong work in Communication Design at the Reid Building. Charlotte Craig has collected organic matter from the natural habitat of moths, re-formed it to make a moth and then photographed the results using an old-school Hasselblad camera - simple and stunning.

Angelina Mok's We Were Sisters started life as an animation on the theme of sibling bullying but has been distilled into black and white digital/analogue prints which have been slashed and burned. The effect is quite startling. This is mark-making which taps into the self-conscious in the most uncomfortable way.

Finally, Chinese student Mi Lin is breathing new life into seemingly lost causes with Carbon Life. In this interactive work, the viewer breathes heavily over a little spout on a white box and the exhalation creates a tree on an adjacent screen. The next thing you know, a receipt is being printed, complete with a lovely wee print of your own freshly breathed-out tree. If that isn't a metaphor for new roots rising out of the ashes, I don't know what is.

Graduate Degree Show 2014, Reid Building at Glasgow School of Art and McLellan Galleries (0141 353 4500, www.gsa.ac.uk) until September 12