CAN'T see the wood for the trees? My advice is: don't go to an art school's degree show.

I mention trees and woods because I'd only been at the Glasgow School of Art's School (GSA) Fine Art's undergraduate degree show for five minutes and all I could see was foliage…. copious amounts of the stuff. Some of it was painted and had lights attached to branches (Vincent Deighan), while elsewhere, parts of tree trunks had been chopped into animal-like creatures with three legs (Viv Walker). A bit like the late George Wyllie's beautifully crude robins but not quite so lovable. I even spied what appeared to be a laboratory of foliage (Shine Christensen).

As I made my way through the labyrinth of the Tontine Building (the fine art department's temporary home in the Merchant City while the Mackintosh Building in Garnethill is being restored), I'd see a twig or two, lashed together and fashioned into a sculptural Thing. My favourite wooden work was by Ann Sweeney, who has used mostly plywood to create a number of pieces: shards in a mesh bag and a "mural" of collaged ply.

This year's GSA undergraduate show is a tactile – and sensual – affair. There is an installation work entirely devoted to bread-making by Eleanora Jaroszynska. Maybe I just imagined the smell of fresh bread. She is planning to prove there is life after a degree show by creating a permanent communal bread oven in Garnethill Park. To make this oven, for which she has already received planning permission, Jaroszynska is using stone and wood that cannot be re-purposed in the Mackintosh Building restoration.

Lea Choi's Coming Soon is informed by her homeland of South Korea and the perpetual threat of nuclear war hanging over its head. Bold in its execution and comical in construction, this war room is presided over by a large plastic "warhead" which looks a bit like a cross between a canoe and a whale – with fiery red fronds and a paper tunnel vomiting out of its mouth. On the wall there are plans for the construction of Fat Man (as opposed to Fat Boy, the codename for the atomic bomb detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945). The audio playing is a recording of each country justifying their first nuclear weapon test. Powerful and relevant.

Close by, Tamara MacArthur has created a crude yet effective peep-show style installation fronted by crimson red curtains and a giant lolling pink papier mache figure. It has won her this year's Steven Campbell Trust, Hunt Medal. GSA graduate Campbell, who painted performance into all his work, would doubtless have been taken with what lies beneath MacArthur's playfully sinister work.

Every day theatrical horror was all around. Josephine Lohoar Self has made a watchable film featuring a talking foetus with a graphic gynaecological matching monochrome curtain through which visitors can enter. Vivienne Kelly's Pigeons of Glasgow stuffs a few of the city's pigeons and sets them out on a rigidly fixed course flying against an etched map showing the places the deceased birds had been found.

The Instagram award (a new cash-free prize from me) goes to Paisley Diamond whose large-scale shiny representation of the Japanese lucky charm maneki-neko cat deserves to go viral.

Robbie Spriddle's bold and sturdy flags-which-are-not-flags were intriguing, throwing up relevant questions of nationhood. Cara Hyndman has created a bathroom of sorts, complete with toilet and a mound of artfully arranged toilet paper, printed with naked ladies at various stages of their toilette. The matching shower curtain and lurid pink and black prints conspire to be a riff on voyeuristic paintings down the art history ages.

One graduating student with her name in lights is Jay Jones, who has added the F-Word into the middle of a neon piece with her name on it. A thoughtful installation titled The Insecurity of Yellow, this neon faces onto another one with the words "I'm not coping well". Do we ever know what people are feeling beneath the surface?

I'm always asked by one particular curator friend to look out for star painters but the only one I could see (and I may have missed some – that happens at a degree show) was Hannah Mooney, who has painted a series of small landscapes and still lives in a restrained palette. They were all festooned by red dots.

Marion Miranda's graphic graffiti style drawings on the white board panels, which separate each student show from the next, reflect on the business of being an artist/art student. She’s even painted a sleeping invigilator into the scene. I cannot tell a lie, I loved this, especially the drawing in which a puzzled figure in black, white and red ponders, notebook in hand, under the words "I'm writing a review in the form of a non-review."

Glasgow School of Art Undergraduate Degree Show 2017, Tontine Building, Trongate, Glasgow until tomorrow.

www.gsa.ac.uk/degreeshow2017