Morningside Gallery has announced a new exhibition featuring work from some of the brightest graduate talent from Scotland’s leading art schools, bringing their work to a wider audience and showcasing the country’s next generation of artists.
The show opens at Morningside Gallery on 7 February and includes paintings, sculpture and jewellery from ten specially-selected recent graduates, several of whom will also feature in the RSA’s New Contemporaries exhibition this spring.
Gallery director Eileadh Swan visited degree shows from each of Scotland’s art colleges last summer and chose ten graduates to take part in the exhibition. The featured artists graduated in 2025 from Edinburgh College of Art, Glasgow School of Art and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design.
Morningside Gallery is known for working with some of the most notable names in contemporary Scottish art. This is the first time that the gallery has presented a show featuring only new graduates, although they did successfully exhibit work from Ella Williams at London’s Affordable Art Fair in October, and have sold her paintings in the gallery since then.
Commenting on the show, Morningside Gallery director Eileadh Swan said: “We’re really excited to launch our first graduate show in the gallery – it’s quite a different proposition from our usual exhibitions as there are no existing followers or collectors for these new graduates’ work, although we were thrilled to see a huge amount of interest in Ella Williams’ work when we exhibited it last October at an art fair in London. Working with artists at this early stage of their careers is not the same as working with established artists and we’re really pleased to offer them a platform to showcase their brilliant work. The window between the art college degree show and life as a practising artist is both exciting and formative and it has been a real privilege to be part of this process, as the artists develop their next steps.
“People have asked what we were looking for when we visited the degree show and I’d say it was both the same and different as when we are sourcing all artists. You are looking for stand-out work – artwork that successfully creates a world before you, and one that is convincing, compelling and engaging enough to hold your attention. This world building and the development of a visual language is a lifetime’s work, and at a degree show you don’t expect to see it fully formed, but if it is there you see it. We also found there were quite strong themes running through all of the degree shows and surprisingly similar work in some cases even across different locations! This made artists who had developed their own voice and ideas in a different direction really stand out.
“Each degree show year is different and we were excited to see so much painting at the 2025 degree shows. Ella Williams, Tom Speedy, Anney White and Harvey Stapleton each won a prestigious RSA John Kinross Scholarship which allowed them to travel to Florence to research and develop their practice in the summer following graduation. At Edinburgh the work of Finlay Trevor, Ella Williams and Harvey Stapleton really spoke to us. Ella’s huge dreamy canvases drew us in with confident mark making and bold uses of space and Harvey’s small and intense oil paintings seemed to create another world through the manipulation of paint itself.
“Finlay’s honest and mature depictions of both the people and the landscapes of rural North West Highland farming and fishing communities reflect a maturity beyond his years and a willingness to engage challenging subject matter – portraiture for a start and Scottish rural life – a subject so familiar as to be at risk of becoming twee. Finlay was selected for the National Portrait Gallery London — Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award (formerly the BP Portrait Award) exhibition for his portraiture and we were blown away by both his painting skills and his hands-on research for the painting.
“At Duncan of Jordanstone Tom Speedy and Anney White’s work really stood out – Tom’s work has had a lot of attention with the degree show marketing featuring his work as the key image and he’s already been exhibited in London and elsewhere. We discovered later that Ella, Harvey and Finlay Trevor were all studio and flatmates here in Edinburgh – unknown to us when we viewed their very strong work! Each with a very different style, they continue to support each other artistically and now work from the same studio as part of the Outer Spaces initiative.
“It’s the first time we’ve shown jewellery in the gallery for a very long time, so we’re looking forward to sharing beautiful pieces from Tina Avery, Rosina Payan Pecorelli and Emilia Santaella Barreto. Sitting alongside their work will be sculpture from Kristel Bodensiek – a Bogotá-born, Edinburgh-based sculptor working with clay, bronze and glass.”
Based at Church Hill in Morningside, the gallery will display over forty new paintings for the exhibition, which can also be viewed and purchased online for anyone who can’t make it to Edinburgh. The exhibition can also be viewed online via the website morningsidegallery.co.uk.
The exhibition will run in the gallery from Saturday 7th February until Sunday 22nd February and is open to the public.
