To celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Dundee’s UNESCO City of Design status, the latest exhibition at the Lamb Gallery looks back at work created by students at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design over the past decade, many of whom have already gone on to successful careers as professional designers.
The show features stunning and thought-provoking examples of animation, comics, graphic design, illustration, jewellery, metal design and textile design.
Here are a few of the highlights from the exhibition:
This interactive adventure book was created by Cara Rooney as part of her degree show and explores the tiny worlds of insects. Flaps and moving parts aim to replicate the feelings of exploring outside and the book becomes bigger when the ant goes on an adventure along, reflecting how much smaller it feels without its family.
Rooney won the Macmillan Prize for Illustration in 2021 for this book and it was published by Two Hoots as A Little World of Ants in April 2024.
From animation , the exhibition shows a number of stills as well as full-length short films running on a TV in the exhibition space, including Fox Fires, which went viral in 2019. This short film was inspired by Finish folklore surrounding the origins of the Aurora Borealis. It follows the story of a young fox and its part in the creation of the stars and the night sky. It received international acclaim and was nominated for the British Animation Awards Public Choice. The film available to watch in full on YouTube. As of the opening of this exhibition, the video has received over 6.5 million views.
Aimee Coulshed is a textile artist whose work takes inspiration from the landscape of the Scottish Highlands. This piece is from a collection of interior textiles as part of her Degree Show which took inspiration from the changing, light, weather and landscape, particularly the soft gradients that occur on distant horizons.
Millar was inspired by St Kilda, a remote archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean, for this Level 3 Graphic Design project to create a new whisky brand based on a Scottish island. St Kilda is known for its UNESCO World Heritage status and 1 million seabirds. The island has no permanent human residents, after the remaining 36 islanders voted to leave in 1930. Millar was inspired by the resolve of the islanders who lived in this tough location and used archival photographs of St Kilians catching puffins and other seabirds, a staple of their diet.
Romanenghi’s Degree Show Above and Below was inspired by the way plants communicate and interact with each other and with pollinating insects. Below ground, plants can transfer information to one another through their roots in intricate root-system communication facilitated by fungi. Above the surface, they exchange sound frequencies and vibrations with bees and other pollinating insects which allow them to be found and pollinated. The vibrant colours of the fire-stained titanium in this ear cuff are based on the spectrographic representation of sound wave data gathered from local bees.
Orange Plates was originally produced as a dissertation project for an MDes Comics & Graphic Novels and explores themes of isolation and queer identity. Since leaving DJCAD, Greenwood has gone on to write, draw and edit various comics, most recently Ruin of the House of the Divine Visage. They have also founded Quindrie Press, an independent comics publisher based in Edinburgh which focuses on helping marginalised and upcoming creators to publish their work.
You can see many more amazing examples of design work from the past decade at the Lamb Gallery. The exhibition will be on show until Saturday 3rd August and is open Monday-Saturday. Find out more at A Decade of Design | University of Dundee, UK.