College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

A very inspired 2012 Art College Degree Show

Bingo halls, circus tents and Hollywood Westerns provide some of the highlights in this year's Edinburgh College of Art Degree Show.

For ten days in June the College has been transformed into the city's biggest gallery space as it celebrated the work of more than 400 graduating artists, film makers, designers and architects.

Previous shows have launched the careers of BAFTA and Turner Prize winners. It was the first to be staged since the College merged with the University of Edinburgh last summer.

Other attractions included a digital artwork built unwittingly by Chinese officials, the defining documentary of a Middle Eastern massacre, and a two-storey tower of previously used artwork.

In the Intermedia strand, an installation, Occasional Showers, brings the experience of standing on a Scottish mountain top into the studio, complete with high winds and drizzle.

Film and Television student Maia Isaacs's documentary about a Yemeni massacre during the Arab Spring has already been broadcast in that country and shown in film festivals around the world. In Animation, BAFTA winner Ainslie Henderson's work is about the anxiety of a performer on stage, voiced by Pirates of The Caribbean star McKenzie Crook.

In Sculpture, a 1970s bingo hall has been recreated in all its ashtray lined glory, a maze full of mysterious mist and glimpses of hidden rooms fills a studio, and a mini circus tent contains an interactive game with a secret that is only revealed upon completion.

Nervousness about the outside world is a theme that unites several of the works. William Darrel has built a space pod, complete with a hammock, to retreat from life after graduation. Lauren Chipeur has made yarn out of the Financial Times newspaper, transforming it from an object which is of no use to her into something she views as practical.

Photography student Caroline Alexander has staged modern versions of Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty.

Other photography students have used an advertiser's flourish to capture the quantity at which food such as salt, chillies, water and oranges becomes toxic, while others document Europe's new ghost towns - semi-finished resorts built for rich ex-pats in Spain.

Anger at the Greek economic collapse is central to Despina Nissiriou's work in Contemporary Art Practice. She has used masking tape to strip the text of a history book about the Nazi occupation of her country and hung the torn words on wall-mounted spikes.

Elsewhere Kim Wilson's seven feet high towers of peat ash and gelatine will dissolve and decompose over the course of the show.

In Jewellery and Silversmithing, Mari Ebbitt built her collection around her grandfather's rare stone collection, crafting broaches and rings out or coral, quartz and Brochantite.

In painting Celyn Bricker has sent hundreds of hand-drawn sunflowers to prominent Chinese officials, along with a website address. Once the individual logs on, one block of a digital picture is filled in online.

Amongst many artworks rendered with obsessive detail, there are drawings of Greggs bakeries and empty libraries, and paintings inspired by Hollywood westerns and the war photographer Robert Capa.

In Architecture and Landscape Architecture students will take their work on reimagining Venice to the Italian city as part of its Architecture Biennale.

In Glass, Jonathan Ball's massive glass installation contains intricate interior voids and channels, while Alan Horsley's other-worldy glass figures are designed to disturbing.

The show was spread across two campuses: Lauriston Place (Schools of Art and Design, Architecture & Landscape Architecture) and Minto House, Chambers Street (Architecture & Landscape Architecture).