London Grads 2008 Pt 1: Who is The Next The Big Thing?

16 Jul 2008 Category: Events & Exhibitions, Graphics, Worldwide

London Grads 2008 Pt 1: Who is The Next The Big Thing?

Beautiful textile using oriental motifs in bright colours with a European touch. Designed by Gemma Ryan, a graduate of BA Printed Textiles of Loughborough University, U.K.

Since the academic year starts in Great Britain in September, June is graduation time. So, plenty of art colleges organise many, many graduate exhibitions. As a result, folks from the industry do crash campus visits on the weekends, in the eternal pursuit of finding London’s next hot shit in design and arts alike. Naturally, PingMag mustn’t miss out on that! We hopped a plane to London, and this is our first delivery of awesome new talent. Watch out for the second part!

Written by Chiemi
Translated by Natsumi Yamane

Free Range: Showcase of art schools throughout U.K.

Free Range is the biggest student exhibition in Europe featuring more than 3,000 graduates from 45 colleges across the U.K.. It’s held only for eight weeks, from the end of May through the end of July at The Old Truman Brewery in East London’s Brick Lane district, known as a hot-spot for the fashion minded youth. You’ll see splendid works born out of free-wheeling thinking…


A chimney of The Old Truman Brewery in London’s familiar grey skies…

Free Range posters are plastered everywhere near Brick Lane.

At Free Range, works on display change weekly. They feature photography in week three and four, followed by fine arts and textiles in week five, seven, eight and nine. Colleges participate in the exhibition each week, so there’s quite a vast number of works displayed in just one week!


The venue is huge! This is just a small part of the 37,000 square metres (400,000 square feet) venue..

Name cards everywhere: Visitors pick up students’ contacts if they like what the see.

Sophie Lewis, a graduate of Bath Spa University with “How to Insert a Tampon.”

Louis Muddiman’s “Enough.” He is from Oxford Brookes University.

After about an hour of viewing the enormous collection of works, you do start to lose your perspective… However, the exhibition by the textile department of Loughborough University in Leicestershire made the deepest impression of the lot. Unfortunately, photography was prohibited at the site, so try to imagine: It was like a garden full of beautiful flowers!


The works of Gemma Ryan from the textile department of Loughborough University. Image courtesy of Gemma Ryan

Gemma uses oriental motifs that still have the European style of finish.

The final week of Free Range will take place from this Friday, the 18th, to Sunday, the 20th of July with a wide variety of graphic, fine art and product design. Hurry up if you haven’t made it there yet!

Central Saint Martins

Saint Martins is one of the six constituent colleges of the University of the Arts London with an established reputation for its fashion and graphic faculties. You surely are familiar with some of the international designers it has produced so far… PingMag went to their graphic department exhibition at OXO tower.


Outside the OXO Tower where the graphic department exhibition was held.

Graduate work compilations piled up….

This year’s graduates of the graphic faculty coming from all over the place.

The first thing you notice upon entering is the diversity of its displays and the works showcased were by no means limited to the “graphic” section. From planar to three-dimensional, from printed to video, and from illustration to fashion — all kinds of media were presented.


One of the most memorable art, an animation by Daniel Gill.

The dolls used in this display met pretty much professional standards.

Fluffy typography objects displayed on the window sill. Cute!

They also had some quite clever name cards.

Delicate typography series by Meng Meng.

“Play Suit,” a playful piece by Rose Clark with sweet felt clouds.

The exhibition was super crowded…

… with visitors totally immersed in the art.

“Freedom” was what we felt — and also our overall impression of the exhibition. And although perfection differed to a great degree, we had some great insights.

Chelsea College of Art and Design

Chelsea College of Art and Design is another one of the constituents of University of the Arts London. In 2005, it relocated to the present superb location for students next to the Tate Gallery. Interestingly, their student exhibition 2008 was held in this atmospheric campus that could almost be a set for a Harry Potter movie…


First, the beautiful college building…

… where even the banisters had made a statement.

We went to the exhibition by B.A. Interior & Spatial Design that gave us a neo-futuristic feel, even inside the historic atmosphere of the college. Naturally, its level of perfection was super high and the models had some kind of Zaha Hadid or Oscar Niemeyer perfection.


Inside the exhibition room.

The beautifully compiled record of the project’s processes was quite intriguing!

The Less Ordinary exhibition by the Graphic Design and Communication course.

A work by Jet Singh Randhawa of the Graphic Design and Communication course.

Chelsea is famous for its Fine Art courses and the many of the world’s top class artists including Turner Prize winners Chris Ofili and Gillian Wearing have turned out from here. So we wouldn’t be surprised at all if any of these graduates would possibly another Turner in the future…


Entry to the exhibition room.

An arrow object by Max Fielden glimmered in the dark.

Bella Szyszkowska’s work consisted of white plaster blocks on top of black ink.

Islamiya Scarr’s “I never learn my lesson” rotated by motor thus making kind of an impact.

Getting lost in its layers: a painting by Damian Curless.

Japanese students were striving too! A work by Yuko Morita.

There was so much to see, but we simply couldn’t make it to all. But we could feel that the students were fully committed! Sadly we can’t show you more works of the Chelsea College students today, so please see over here!

Congratulations to every graduate! Plus, don’t miss the second part from our tour, coming next week!

66 Comments

  1. You can see more work by Chelsea and CSM students at the University’s Showtime website:

    http://www.arts.ac.uk/showtime/chelsea
    http://www.arts.ac.uk/showtime/csm

    Posted by: Chris on July 16th, 2008 at 8:24 pm

  2. Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,…

    welcome, comrades!

    Posted by: mao lee on July 16th, 2008 at 9:11 pm

  3. That’s it? I expected better… Next big thing? LOL

    Posted by: Peter McC. on July 17th, 2008 at 3:34 am

  4. The oriental textile design, wtf so shitty i seen better in Chinatown.
    So authentic so the white folks.

    Posted by: Mori on July 17th, 2008 at 3:40 am

  5. Holy shit, not safe for work. And seriously, it’s pretty damn lame to slam stuff when all you can manage is “this sucks.” Frickin’ useless trolls.

    Posted by: earl on July 17th, 2008 at 7:32 am

  6. @earl: yeah, quite. even if the stuff above wasn’t worth the time of day (& I don’t agree), it would make more sense to criticise the writer who made the choices — they’re only a fraction of 1% of what would have been on show all over london this summer. not sure it’s ‘not safe for work’ though, unless your bosses/IT dept don’t have thinking brains attached to the signals coming from their eyeballs. ahh, i see…

    anyway, i was at a graduate design/art exhibition, at the RCA I think it was, and while the majority of the exhibits were merely ok, and a few were downright rubbish, some were great. that’s normal — they’re students. no-one would expect every essay written by graduates in, say, a history course, to be earth-shatteringly good. spending time sifting earth to get to the occasional nugget of gold is 1/2 the fun anyway. too time-consuming for ADD-suffering trolls though…

    Posted by: sim on July 17th, 2008 at 4:25 pm

  7. such cruel comments. this is an interesting article, especially for me as future student to be studying in london.

    thanks for the article guys.

    Posted by: eH on July 17th, 2008 at 11:07 pm

  8. Go and F##K OFF back to Chinatown then “Mori”

    Posted by: MJ on July 18th, 2008 at 3:15 am

  9. Chiemi did you come to London?

    should have called up me and Digs for a couple guides - return the favour of our Tokyo meet!

    Will there be some RCA coverage in pt2? maybe some UCL Bartlett?? Some amazing work there too…

    Posted by: Tim C. on July 18th, 2008 at 4:03 am

  10. mori, go fk yourself. Seriously, to leave a comment like that on a blog about someones work that they have spent so much time and effort on takes a really heartless and fked up ct. You really musn’t have much in your life you sad little fuer.

    Also to the rest of you who have left a negative unconstructive comment or who are thinking of leaving one, just take a moment to think about what effect these have on the people who’s work it is!

    Posted by: ty on July 18th, 2008 at 6:07 am

  11. I’m glad to see some students’ work from lboro, where I have studied design as well, featured here. Totally unexpected! (Though mine is not textile.)
    I felt their multimedia textile works in particular were very intriguing and had huge potential in many other areas of art+design.

    Bit of a shame PingMag couldn’t make it to the ‘new designers’ show, another massive UK graduate show with +4000 students’ work being exhibited.
    This one has just finished last week and I was there..! Would have loved to see one of the pingmag writers. :)

    Posted by: Taku on July 18th, 2008 at 8:59 am

  12. @sim Cheers! Exactly.

    Posted by: earl on July 18th, 2008 at 11:31 am

  13. [...] a look round I spotted MocoLoco and Ping Mag’s write ups - I love the textiles from Loughborough Uni too. There’s some good [...]

    Posted by: Ctrl Art Del - Free Range Summer Shows « Jazamatazz on July 20th, 2008 at 10:08 pm

  14. Might be worth your while to check out the work of the Graphic Design and Illustration students at the University of Brighton (of which I was one of this years graduating class) at http://www.gdi08.co.uk

    Posted by: Tony on July 22nd, 2008 at 9:20 am

  15. I studied in Chelsea College before.
    The exhibition was funny anyway.

    There are just a few pics of interior design course exhibition.
    http://a-to-a.blogspot.com/2008/07/chelsea-college-exhibition-2008.html

    Posted by: A on July 22nd, 2008 at 9:44 pm

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