Review: The Gray's School of Art Degree Show 2016

Don't get me wrong. There is plenty to savour. But some of it was just a bit too clean – too neat and tidy if you like. Maybe the digital age has made it easier for artists to make work?

Laser cutting and 3d printing, for example, has become A Thing in our art schools. Not a bad thing. Just a very sharp and clean Thing.

Maybe this prompted Hannah Halliday to create a series of anarchic knitted objects? One of them, Aw F*ck, is a wall-hanging with a difference. A half-knitted threadbare jersey – still with two needles attached. Hannah neatly expunged the "u" from knitted text to subvert an ancient craft in the wittiest and sock-it-to-em way. I hereby confess I shared the life out of this on all my social media platforms. It was in turn shared many times over. The social circle turns in a roundelay for the digital age. One visitor has already snapped up Aw F*ck for a £300. Knitting Takes Balls was still available on the day I visited.

In contrast, Chloe Wilson has created a rather lovely walk-in forest of floor-to-ceiling crisp white paper curtains. She has laser cut text into these which presents her own retelling of George Orwell's classic dystopian tale, 1984, as children's fable. Screen-printed animals in vivid orange and navy blue loom large in a couple of the hangings. On the ground, confetti-like, are scattered cut-out letters. While I really enjoyed this work, I found myself drawn to these scattered letters which seemed to migrate out of Chloe's show and into all sorts of far-flung corners of the art school.

Anna Gray has made a quasi-religious act of putting marks on hand-made, stitched-together parchment-style surfaces. Writing, yet not writing, these neat rows of pen lines are hypnotic, not least of all because the lines seem to come and go as the pen runs out ink. Dominating this show is a beautiful life-size self-portrait photograph showing the artist naked but wrapped head-to-toe in gossamer-thin fabric, like an Ancient Egyptian princess at the point of mummification.

One of the simplest, yet most effective, works in the whole show is by Dimitra Laina, who, according to one the tutors I spoke to, whittled a whole bunch of ideas for her degree show down to this single one. A thin black line of paint runs along one clean white wall. On an adjacent wall is written – at the same height – the words: "STRAIGHT LINE OF 27'6' AT THE LEVEL OF THE EYE." It's enough to make the ghost of Brian Sewell howl at the moon, but I liked it very much. And it was bang on my eye level.

Several students have taken dementia as a subject and examined its effects in different ways. William Vernon, who has worked with people living from dementia, has presented five large photographs with titles such as The Draughtsman, The Welder and The Domestic. Simple, solid and lacking in artifice, these are powerful works.

Toni Harrower also worked with dementia sufferers and has created a series of oil paintings which hang on to routines and pattern on the surface while underneath, chaos reigns as the paint takes off in all directions. There's so much to these beautiful paintings – layers express the passage of time while the push and pull of chaos versus control is omnipresent.

Painter Katie Watson's show had been garlanded with awards and rightly so. She has taken the idea of humans imposing pattern and structures on the land and painted from her own perspective as the daughter of two architects and the granddaughter of farmers. It's as though this DNA has seeped onto her canvases, which have titles like The Sculpture of Fields and Ordered Anarchy. Not only are they lovely to look at, they make you want to hang around.

Simona Stojanovska also cross-examines the marks we make on the natural world in her paintings. One – a two-colour work in pale lemon and black – even has its own metal lattice fence around it, partially torn apart at the bottom right-hand corner.

Fables and myths also found their way into many a student show. Against the name of one student, Harmony Bury, I have written the words "amazing wings". Using ("ethically-sourced") bee's wings, Harmony has superimposed them onto sections of human bodies and made a series of photographs. The juxtaposition of these delicate wings on solid flesh is a master stroke. It's hard to pick out a favourite because you find yourself staring in wonder at them all, but the two rows of wings resting on a woman's clavicle is hard to beat.

Izzy Thomson has used Icelandic adventures as a starting point to allow her imagination to run riot in a series of narrative paintings which are part landscape and part sculpture. Her fishy-looking man in a rowing boat about to tip over the edge of a gushing waterfall is wonderful.

I found a lot of humour on show in Aberdeen this year. Sean Wheelman's show mashes up the surreal with a workmanlike approach to making – or remaking – objects. In one work he has welded three red bikes of different sizes together to create an unrideable unicycle. In another a green boiler suit studded with origami-style metal aeroplanes lies flat out on the ground. Above this, climbing the wall, is an Action Man toy in a green boiler suit. He has actual paper aeroplanes to help speed him on his way.

Josie Hudson's in-yer-face alter ego Shirley, who bares a passing resemblance to Kim Wilde at the peak of her 1980s fame, made me laugh. In her “uniform” of cropped tweed jacket, blonde wig and heavy make-up, Shirley is seemingly all mouth. There was a serious point behind Shirley's on-screen bravado. How do others see us? It's a perennial theme to which graduating artists return year after year. In Josie's case, her performance only took me half the way there as ’Shirley" didn't turn up for the actual performance advertised on her wall.

Maybe that was part of the performance?

I will never know…

The Gray's School of Art Degree Show 2016 is at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen until 5pm today. www.rgu.ac.uk/degreeshow