Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting exhibition at the Royal Academy featuring work by three second-year students studying at the Royal Academy Schools. I   like to see these annual series of shows but do wish they would offer some explanation of the works. They are often conceptual work which you do need a bit of help to understand. I liked Lolly Adams’s weird sculptures using found objects centred, in both cases, on a bright pink mannequin head. One seemed to be a fountain and as the friend I was with said, it was a shame it wasn’t working. I also liked Dwayne Coleman’s large blue work made up of a patchwork of blue material. Was it a statement on Indigo and colonialism which is a common theme in contemporary art? His two smaller works seem to have had sound associated with them but I missed that. Maya Gurung-Russell Campbell offered a strange wall sculpture which looked like a discarded fishing net. Some help would be appreciated! Closed 16 February 2025  

Novel exhibition at the Royal Academy showing the work of three of the Royal Academy Schools students. Lolly Adams, Djofray Makumbu and James Sibley explore “staging through methods of set building, costuming and moving image production” according to the blurb. I must admit a lot of the blurb was pretentious and incomprehensible like “Presented here are fragments of the narrative vehicles in which each artist escapes across the causeway, towards finished work.” Please teach students to present their work in a simple way. Looking at the handout since I realise the random old phone in the floor was a soundscape by Djofray Makumbu. It would have been used to have a label on it to encourage its use. That said I liked Lolly Adams bits of costume design and animated avatar wearing it but my favourite was James Sibley’s recreation of the cupboard under his grandparents stairs created to the size it appeared to him as a child. Closed 3 November 2024