BIAD’s Margaret Street site is beautiful; the building has intriguing and impossibly imaginative original fittings wherever you look. The setting was used with maximum impact in the BIAD end of year degree show. Showing photographs, Syeda Bibi superimosed signifiers of British ideology over Bangladeshi landscapes in her quietly arresting composites. Natalie O’Keefe made something epic, vast and terrifying out of the most ordinary of modern spaces, from the threshold of an escalator to an aisle in a supermarket.
Sara Dobson had a very unusual style and a distinctive way with line, creating shimmering drawing based works from layers and fragments. Kate Peel used line to connect disparate interiors and details, forming in the process conceptual landscapes with a sense of the unwieldy, and some bizarre touches. Mathew Webb used a graphic style to create an intricate world possibly influenced by Paul Noble.
Daniel Salisbury seemed to investigate how language brushes up against and forms the earth, and how this most real of tangibles is a linguistic concept. A pendant and tiny 3D world rendered in the atonal blue and green of a child’s drawing hung against an seemingly endless sentence made from only one structural principle, the conjunctive ‘and’. Just as a child not yet adept at the narrative tricks with which we can telesoope and frame information might breathlessly and monotonously string a sentence together.
Adil Amin’s gestural painting style was applied to very British streetscapes, sometimes showing a mosque sometimes not, with a romantic touch. The painter also applied his disarming style to young men in hoodies. Another take on Modern Britain was offered by Hayley Casey whose series of simplified and aptly cartoonish portraits, showed Jeremy Kyle types, each captioned in a way appropriate to the headlines of that zealously moral and dissipate show.
Fran Booth showed a fantastic series of paintings depicting various objects, from a record half out of its sleeve, to a fabric hanger, to a string of pearls. Booth’s still lifes were both delicate and intense, and the objects seemed to have been subjected to some devotion. Similarly Luke Thompson invigorated a genre that can often emerge as corny: paintings depicting animals, in his weird cluster of a bird and his painting of a fox that equally seemed a test for colour blindness.
Wendy Derrick created really interesting paintings using thick cubes of coloured paint to suggest pixellization (perhaps this was a nod to Chuck Close, we have got so close the image obscures) and seeming to investigate the increasingly slippery boundaries between technology, painting and reality. Matthew Hunt spread his work in clusters across an entire wall: photos; beautifully, softly rendered skulls over the pages of comic books; lovely economical portraits.