EDINBURGH. Edinburgh College of Art announced the Postgraduate Degree Show 2009. The exhibition will feature the work of 32 MA students graduating from the newly aligned School of Design, which now incorporates Design and Applied Arts, Fashion and Textiles, and Visual Communication specialisms.

The exhibition will also feature the work of two students graduating from ‘Art, Space and Nature’ – a unique postgraduate programme only available at Edinburgh College of Art, which examines the inter-relationships between various art and architecture specialisms.

Postgraduate Degree Show 2009 presents the final work of postgraduates working in Interior Design, Product, Fashion, Photography, Animation, Jewellery, Graphic Design, Illustration and Film Directing. In addition to the exhibition of work at the College, a selection of the Masters films will be screened at a special event at the Filmhouse on Thursday 27 August, starting at 8.30pm.

Reflecting the now inherent internationalism of Edinburgh College of Art, the students from across Europe, from Lebanon, Taiwan, China, New Zealand and India have worked intensely for one year towards this exhibition. With each student taking a unique approach in their research and their practice, the Postgraduate Degree Show is a truly international group exhibition in outlook and intent.

The exhibition is presented over four floors of the Evolution House building and includes cinema rooms screening showreel compilations of short films by the students graduating in Film Directing and Animation. Visitors will be able to check individual screening times for each film, with details also available on the College website: www.eca.ac.uk/festival

Highlights from the Postgraduate exhibition include:

Valeria Mitelman (29) from Minsk, Belarus will exhibit The Lothians, a series of colour portraits of families, photographed at their homes in Edinburgh and the wider Lothian area. As a body of work, The Lothians represents a collective portrait of a region. Each portrait tells a story, asking us to consider the nature of family, our use of domestic space, the physiognomy of families and the way we present ourselves to the outside world. Working on the project over the course of her year-long MA, the artist found a means of experiencing Edinburgh and its environs, a way of meeting people and making connections.

Evan Gray (25) from Sheffield has examined the relationship between music and art, specifically the way in which the cultural values of punk and psychedelia were represented in the visual design of record sleeves and promotional material. With reference to the work of The Velvet Underground, The 13th Floor Elevators and Timothy Leary, Gray’s own work explores innovative new ways of exhibiting such artefacts as the psychedelic music poster, the punk flyer and the fanzine.

Patricia Delso Lucas (29) from Madrid presents Just to call you dad, a short film about the search for her unknown father, a British piano player who met her mother on the Costa del Sol in the 1970s.

Marta Strumidlo (26) from Poland explores the use of optical illusion within different graphic art disciplines. The main focus in her research is whether optical illusion can aid visual representation. Her degree show exhibition will show examples of various types of optical illusion, including moving image, reflective symmetry, anamorphosis and distortion.

Chris Cottrell (30) from New Zealand is one of the two MA students graduating from the Art, Space & Nature programme. His work deals with architectural drawing and its relationship to space, material and perception.

Xinwei Hu (25) from China has spent her MA in Product Design researching ‘emotional design’ and her theory that objects have personalities; that they hold meaning and trigger our memories. She has designed a unique coffee table as a development of this research, the surface of which is covered in dark thermochromic ink which turns transparent when heated objects are placed on it, revealing the objects placed in the drawers underneath.