Last month’s degree show at Dundee’s Duncan of Jord­an­stone­ college was dominated by animals, with fur and feathers flying ever­y­where. Down in Glasgow, a good number of this year’s School of Art graduates seem to have been thinking with their stomachs, using food in sculp­tures, in­stal­l­a­tions and per­for­m­ances.

One of the high­lights of the show is Rose Hughes-Jones’s hanging sculpture, made from a dense tangle of pyramid-shaped bags, im­preg­n­ated with honey, which slowly drips on to the studio floor, forming a gooey little slick. Off to the side, a perfectly smooth pool of honey is bounded by a ring of fur. Besides being a beautiful, med­it­at­ive piece, it also makes use of the one sense that artists rarely seek to engage, smell - the scent is so thick you can almost taste it.

Thank­fully, this is not yet the case with the work of Gary Bolam. He has sewn strips of de­sic­c­ated ham together and hung them over a portable plug-hole, presented the liver of an un­iden­ti­fied animal on a rough-hewn plinth, and, in a curiously moving piece, placed a dead fly on a greasy slick of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. A video in which Bolam toys with another dead insect adds a dark note to the skewed humour.

Erik Smith’s work is, by com­par­is­on, almost earnest, using snacks as raw materials to craft a sort of edible min­im­al­ism: grapes are strung precisely on a wire bisecting his studio space, pizza boxes are neatly stacked in a corner and knobbly cheese-flavoured crisps are piled into towers.

Like Hughes-Jones, Penny Rafferty makes use of honey, but this time in what looks to have been a rather violent per­for­m­ance, which left great smears of black paint and honey, applied with strips of fabric across the studio walls. Helen Tubriddy’s has an air of violence, too, but the results are more con­trolled, with a tangle of umbrellas and picture frames broken down and re­as­sem­bled to form a spindly in­fest­a­tion, ac­com­pan­ied by smashed, smeared eggs and balloons filled with yolk.

These last two point to another strong trend this year for immersive, un­res­trained in­stal­l­a­tions, which often threaten to escape the bounds of their allotted space. Laura Yuile has fashioned one of the best of these complete en­vir­on­ments. In a crazed update to Baroque excess, she has piled up great waves of tape torn from video cassettes, fashioned dense forms from in­ter­lock­ing kirby grips and made lurid collages from the pages of body­build­ing magazines.

Hazel Donaldson takes a more soothing tack with her beach in­stal­l­a­tion. A steep sand dune and projected waves hidden by a gauzy curtain, and visitors are invited to take off their shoes and play. Laura Mc­Con­n­ach­ie’s tiny foil figures, lit by rainbow lamps, at first seem similarly welcoming, but there’s an un­der­cur­rent of threat - the shadows cast by the figures have claws. The work of Ronja Svaneborg, whose in­stal­l­a­tion displays an unusual breadth of practice, has a sinister edge, too, matching light­bul­bs sheathed in leath­er­et­te with a ball of sticking plasters and a chair, its seat reduced to wood shavings.

Carolyn Barrett does not quite fit the tendency toward cohesive con­struc­tions, but her sculp­tures work together to foster an uneasy at­mo­sphere - low, vaguely medical seating suggests some un­pleas­ant procedure, matched by a stool tethered to the wall and but­tressed with a steel rod.

Frances Walker bridges the gap between the graduates seeking to overwhelm their audience, and those who work with more economy. Walker has hung long rolls of tran­s­lu­cent paper from the ceiling, unfurling across the floor, smeared the walls with a sickly green paste, and wrapped strip lights in DayGlo green paper. From a distance, it seems slight, but up close, it reveals Walker’s gift for combining elements in a way that fosters con­nec­tions between them.

The same might be said of Caroline Gallagher, who makes taut, re­strained sculp­tures, lifting materials from the builders yard. One piece sees a section of steel mesh, cut, bent and adorned with a tied strip of yellow lacing, another consists of a squat stack of gently striated concrete blocks, a third is nothing more than a metal pole pushing a folded piece of foam into a corner.

John McLaren goes a little further, but again uses restraint in his in­vest­ig­a­tions into everyday materials, con­nect­ing a wall-mounted wooden frame to a gently curved metal grille with bungee cords, and weaving frayed shoelaces around a black bamboo stick leant against the wall. Nicola Nisbet’s chosen material is water, liquid and solid - she has made a memento mori in the form of frozen casts of a skull and flowers, and used melting ice and paint to make sculpture-paintings, leaving behind drips of black and white on her studio walls.

Next come the artists whose work is rooted in en­vir­on­ments, be they natural, built or social. Cassandra Baron’s work is perhaps the simplest on show, but among the most affecting, con­s­ist­ing of an open en­trance­way, leading on to a claus­tro­phobic corridor which cul­min­ates in the dead end of a sharp corner - a concise in­vest­ig­a­tion of our re­la­tion­ship to ar­chi­tec­ture and interiors. Ric Warren occupies similar territory, with a large-scale model of three homes merged into one, with a foam-clad flattened section offering comfy seating for visitors. This welcoming sofa of the suburbs is undercut with another model home, this time bobbing half-submerged in the sea of the gallery floor. Natalie Lambert has engaged with the fabric of the Mack­in­tosh building itself, building kinetic columns into a stairwell, which would look like original features, if they weren’t moving.

Keith Allen is rather more bois­ter­ous, cobbling together a temporary social club, complete with mildewed camping equipment, a dart board and oche, the latter em­blazoned with the crude, mys­ti­fy­ing slogan, “Dae ye want to see ma dugs dance?”.

Last, the painters. Louise Chang’s circular collaged works stand out, with their dense layers of paint, as do Richard Oscar Godfrey’s naive paintings of bleeding limbs and masked figures. Claire Paterson’s huge canvases, por­tray­ing arcane rituals augmented by cryptic symbols, and Lucy Macdonald’s queasily psy­che­del­ic portraits of weeping women are also strong. Those four aside, precious few painters make their mark, and fewer pho­to­graph­ers still.

This makes for a decidedly lopsided show, leaning heavily towards sculp­tur­al work and in­stal­l­a­tion, but the graduates working in those fields show enough verve more than to make up for the lack­lus­tre per­for­m­ance of some of their peers.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 13th July, 2008.