A funny thing happens at the degree shows: there is so much art, stuffed into every studio, corridor, nook and cranny of the art schools that a viewer’s brain can’t quite cope, and attempts to pick out themes, group artists together and spot trends in a bid to impose order on the chaos. Artists whose work, if seen in different galleries weeks apart, might seem to have little in common become kissing cousins, and the artists whose work stands out set the tone for their peers.

At Duncan of Jord­an­stone­ College, the first theme to hove into view is the animal. There are beasts ever­y­where, real or imagined, and it seems as if half of the studio spaces contain fur, feathers, hides and horns.

Ashley Nieuwen­hu­izen’s work is perhaps the most powerful ex­am­in­a­tion of the re­la­tion­ship between human and animal. She has performed a series of arcane rituals, strapping dead birds to her body with twine, slowly, de­lib­er­ately ingesting horse hair, which are matched to hybrid drawings and a furry knapsack studded with teats which emits contented purrs. Dis­tur­b­ing stuff, sure, but Nieuwen­hu­izen is serious, not out to shock. Ai Kato’s sculp­tures are decidedly dis­com­fort­ing too. She has crafted a new mythology inhabited by a figure adorned with duck bills and mollusc shells who surfs a wave of ghosts, and a winged and bearded baby nestled in a chamber made of animal hides. Iain Som­mer­ville’s work is a sort of update to the Punch and Judy show, with angry cartoons re­min­is­cent of Ralph Steadman over­look­ing a pair of literally pig-headed thugs. Laurie Gault’s striking sculp­tures are another direct look at human-animal relations, this time expressed with great restraint.

Gault’s work - antlers on poles cast in a matte plasticky yellow substance, an outsize crocodile clip with a peacock feather for a tail, stumpy thumb-like forms - flags up another trend. The best of the graduates making sculpture show a great affinity for their materials. Scott Shepherd breathes life into grubby rubber castings of two-pin plugs, showing an in­flat­able udder-like structure and a poisonous jellyfish submerged in brackish water. Alistair Jelks’ fig­ur­at­ive sculpture, like a pro­foun­dly depressed modern take on Rodin’s The Thinker, stands out thanks to his assured use of cast iron with its patina of rust. Sharon McNiven engages with the history of her chosen media, exploring the pos­s­ib­il­it­ies of tra­di­tion­al wood­work­ing tech­n­iques to make precise abstract forms. Lauren Curran disrupts the pristine sheen of her small sculp­tures with imprints of mushrooms, and what look like tiny pursed lips. These sculptors know their stuff, in both senses of the term.

When it comes to painting and drawing, the trend, if you can call it that, is skill. Ghe Zhang’s hyper-real canvases work with multiple tra­di­tions in Chinese art, and are executed with a quiet panache. Joanna Fraser is like a latter-day Joan Eardley, painting girls at rest and at play in a fluid style, allowing sur­roun­d­ings to drift away to keep the focus firmly on her young subjects. Camilla Symons is a superb draught­s­wo­man, with some fine work in pencil on show, but it is her sil­ver­point ren­der­ings of rabbits and birds that really take the breath away. Two painters with a shared liking for urban spaces also stand out. David Anderson almost seems in awe of the un­der­passes, car parks and un­as­su­m­ing stair­wells he paints, while Ross Brown prefers derelict vistas, un­der­min­ing his deft ren­der­ings with hastily-made charcoal marks. Then there’s Nicole Porter and Fraser Gray, two very different painters who match technical facility with a concern for the process of making work. Porter’s realist canvases include self-portraits of the artist in her studio, charming small-scale paintings of pages in her sketch­book and a painting of a painting of her fellow graduates in con­ver­sa­tion. Gray, meanwhile, sits on the fence between street art and studio work, inserting a canvas into a wall-drawing and drilling viewing port into the wall over­look­ing one of his large-scale pieces.

This tendency explore the process of making art is to the fore in the work of artists of a more ex­pli­citly con­cep­tu­al bent, too. Poppy Brewer presents the results of a per­for­m­ance, also doc­u­men­ted in grainy black and white video, in which she crafted a sort of cloth shelter, cut precise strips from a sheet of paper and made gnomic notes about the idea of infinity on black­boards. Breeshey Gray performs too, turning her allotted space into a domestic salon, chatting about art with her friends, and drinking tea. This everyday ritual is explored again via a col­lec­tion of carefully cata­lo­gued tea bags, a quirky monument to a year’s worth of cuppas. Another art-making ritual, this one rather more riotous, can be found in Nadia Rossi’s madcap lab. Rossi has filled a room with bits and bobs, and cut holes in the walls so that, with the help of visitors, she can poke her arms into the space and chuck paint about, combine objects and otherwise overcome her self-imposed re­stric­tions. Fraser MacDonald’s rough-hewn hoops match one vicious game, croquet, with another, the art world, while his gilded training shoe and pas­t­or­ally painted Tetrapak carton are, thanks to their museum-like present­a­tion, works of art about curation. This is un­der­lined by another of the artist’s projects, a tiny gallery housed in a locker, which over the last year has shown pieces by real live artists, David Shrigley among them, and what look like figments of MacDonald’s ima­gin­a­tion.

There are, of course, plenty of artists who buck the trends, carving out a niche all their own. Kirsten Wilson has made two matching mono­l­ith­ic struc­tures into which she blasts high volume noise. The interior of the first is bare - step inside and be deafened - the second is lined with sound-proofing material, together they expose the re­la­tion­ship between sound and space. Graeme Plunkett works with sound too. He has housed a domestic canary in a cage rigged up with sensors and tiny loud­speak­ers which play re­cord­ings of birdsong triggered by the bird’s motion. Ethically suspect? Perhaps, but an in­triguing look at the audible en­vir­on­ment non­eth­e­less. Outside the building, Euan James Taylor’s work a highlight of the show. Taylor, who col­l­ab­or­ated with Macdonald on the locker gallery, has rigged up glor­i­ously pointless struc­tures out of pallets - a stile over a wall is placed right next to an en­trance­way, for example - and, in a little caravan, documents the act­iv­it­ies of his invented or­gan­isa­tion, In­e­f­fi­ci­ent Solutions, “purveyors of su­per­fi­ci­al com­mod­it­ies” devoted to “creating and solving problems”.

Of course, not all the work on show matches the standard set by the artists listed above, but this is without doubt a strong year group. There is nothing here to make you cringe, no em­bar­rass­ingly de­r­iv­at­ive works, and very few outright failures. It’s a fine start to the degree show season.