From bedbugs wearing specs to platefuls of teeth, students reveal inspiration behind their artworks

Large oil paintings, a bedbug wearing specs and reading the TV listings, a plateful of eyeballs and teeth, 1,000 emotionally poised figures, and brightly coloured earrings made from football boot studs.

It can only mean one thing – the Art & Design Undergraduate Degree Show 2025 is open, at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, part of the University of Dundee.

More than 450 final-year Art & Design students are exhibiting at this year’s show, and every student’s collection of work has its own story behind its creation.

Below, we spoke to some of this year’s students about their journeys, but with nearly every inch of the art school’s Matthew and Crawford buildings taken over the by exhibition, there are so many more to discover.

Don’t miss your chance to explore the artworks. DJCAD’s Art & Design Undergraduate Degree Show 2025 is open until Sunday 1 June, from 10am to 4pm daily. Open late on Thursday 29 May until 8pm.

Young artist’s arthritis condition inspires army of little figures 

Art & Philosophy student Joy Jennings, who has lived with Rheumatoid arthritis since the age of three, has created a ‘visual language’ for pain and emotion through 1,000 little coloured figures.

Joy, from Fife, has struggled with chronic pain throughout her life and in the past has had difficulties in finding words to express her feelings and emotions to family, friends and doctors.

Inspired by her own needs, Joy created her figures to convey different emotions and has been using them to run therapeutic art workshops across Dundee. 

The 24-year-old has led regular drop-in sessions at a space within the Keiller Centre, Dundee, as well as workshops at a mental health group and two Dundee primary schools.

The brightly coloured figures are made to be held and have been created from four different tactile materials – glazed ceramic, jesmonite, concrete jesmonite and solid bronze.

During the workshops, Joy, encourages participants to play with the figures, discuss the emotions they see and create scenes with multiple characters.

She said, “The conversation that comes from the play aspect of these workshops is organic.

“People’s interpretations of the characters as they engage with them can be a projection of their own emotions, and it can help them explore these emotions or open up about their experiences.

“Therapy can seem exclusive and inaccessible for many people. Art or drama therapy is less formal but it’s still behind a wall for most people.

“I wanted to create a new approach which allows people to access art therapy concepts and creatively wonder at their own pace, without any expectation.”

Goalkeeper recycles boots and gloves to create jewellery championing equality

Jewellery & Metal Design student Megan Colvan has created striking jewellery from her football boot studs and goalkeeper gloves in a bid to champion equality between men’s and women’s football.

Megan hopes to encourage more young girls to get involved in the sport, through her brightly coloured jewellery and medals made from her own sports equipment and eco-friendly materials including jesmonite.

While completing her studies, goalkeeper Megan was also captain of the University’s Women’s 1s football team and led the team to win the BUCS tier 3B league. 

As a teenager she played for the semi-professional SWPL 2 team Kilmarnock having first picked up a football around the age of 10.

Megan, now 21, who lives in Dundee, said, “I want to spread the positivity of sport and get as many young girls involved as possible.

“Football’s not only for boys. Girls should be running about and getting sweaty and experiencing the joy of scoring a goal or shared emotions with their teammates.

“I’ve made so many friends for life through football and improved my team building skills. My confidence has really grown.

“As a goalkeeper you have to vocalise to the team what’s happening on the pitch. When I was younger, I used to struggle with that but now I’m so loud.”

Megan hopes her jewellery and medals will open up further conversation around the benefits of women’s football.

Move to Dundee unlocked Nigerian artist’s duel-identity 

Being asked where he was from on an almost daily basis made Fine Art student Obiaje Andrew Ejiga curious about how others perceived his identity.

The 22-year-old, who moved from Nigeria to study at Dundee, began to delve into his own self-identity.

Feeling a pull between his traditional African heritage and his modern-day persona, Obiaje discovered that he felt he had two identities, which both lived in coexistence.

This led him to research the work of American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois and his theory of Double Consciousness, where people feel the need to suppress their identity to fit in with a different culture.

Obiaje then decided to produce a series of oil paintings with a theme of duel-identity, or ‘duality’, and approached strangers he came across which he felt might fit in with this idea.

He said, “I knew the message I wanted my work to carry, but I didn’t yet know who the models would be.

“I wanted to find people who genuinely connected with the themes I was exploring. I ended up meeting strangers who became the central figures in the story I was trying to tell.”

Obiaje took two sets of photos of the models, some in their everyday clothes and others in their cultural attire, then sourced fabrics which were culturally specific and used them within the paintings.

He added. “I want to encourage understanding and empathy and to remind people that there’s always more beneath the surface.

“I hope to inspire others to approach difference with curiosity rather than judgment.”

Artist challenges human perception of bugs through sculpture

A loveable bedbug wearing specs and reading the TV listings has been humorously positioned upright on his bum by his creator Afton Dick.

But the huge grub lying on a baby crib next to him is intended to create a different reaction, as is the 140cm wide Cork-lid Trapdoor spider which guards the entrance to Afton’s exhibit.

The ‘animal-obsessed’ Art & Philosophy student hopes to challenge the way people think about certain types of animals based on how they are perceived.

Afton, 24, said, “I’m fascinated with how human relationships with animals change depending on our interpretation of them – especially the ones we live alongside with but choose to ignore, like bedbugs.

“We may be unaware they are there or notice aspects of them, but we choose to ignore them because it would drive us insane to think about them.

“Our interpretations also influence how we treat and respond to animals – for example the killing of pigeons because their poo is acidic. That inspired me to make the pigeon pooing in a potty.

“We’re given all this information about these animals but what we choose to do with that information is up to us.”

Afton, from East Ayrshire, has split her exhibit into two areas, the second of which is focused on scientific influence, where she used old artefacts and models to create her sculptures.

Platefuls of ceramic eyeballs and teeth created by artist to break barriers 

In an attempt to break down barriers between art and everyday objects, Millie Stewart has created an interactive scene, which she encourages people to pick up and engage with.

At first glance the pastel-coloured dining scene looks like a child’s play area, but look again and there are bowls full of ceramic teeth, plates of ceramic eyeballs and wooden spikes on the chairs.

The Fine Art student’s aim was to merge the contrasting worlds of childhood play and violence, as was previously common ground in public culture.

Millie, 22, from Helensburgh, said, “Everything for kids seems to be censored now but when I was young books, TV programmes and films all used violence, monsters or scary situations as a way to protect children.

“Tom and Jerry, for example, used violence as humour, but the message was to make children aware so that they would recognise potential danger.”

Millie also wanted to explore the gap between childhood and adulthood by encouraging people to play with her creations and enjoy being immersed in her artwork.

She added, “I’d love people to become more relaxed around art – particularly around pottery. 

“These things are made to be held and used. There shouldn’t really be a difference between a vessel at home or one in an art context.”

Fragmented memory represented in artist’s layered prints

Building blocks from the past are represented through a large wooden structure containing transparent prints, including old photos of Emma Hammond’s two grandmothers.

Through lots of research, the 22-year-old Fine Art student was able to portray her late relatives’ personalities in her artwork, despite both women having died before she was born.

Emma, from Erskine, made a series of layered prints which merge images, including symbolic collages of photos of each grandmother and flowers.

The layering is intended to create a blurring within the images and some contain mirrors, to distort their presentation in a kaleidoscope effect.

She said, “I wanted to explore the concept of how we create connections with people we’ve never met and how we interpret them through other people’s memories.

“Both of my grans passed away before I was born so I never knew them as individuals and I almost see them together when I think of them.

 “Our memories are so fragmented, we never see a clear picture. That’s what I’ve tried to show through the distortion.

“I hope people who come to see it will relate it in a way which makes them feel nostalgic and that it will spark their own memories.”

Artist’s experiences inspired trauma recovery themed work

From a shimmering pearl, formed over time after a trauma within nature, grew a theme within Molly Ellis’ artwork, addressing human recovery from trauma.

Inspired by her own childhood experiences, Fine Art student Molly is exhibiting a collection of paintings containing figures and seaside scenes.

The 23-year-old grew up in Glasgow but her grandparents lived in Ireland, whom she regularly visited as a child, along with several cousins.

The children would play together in her grandmother’s ‘sand room’, unaware that the room was actually a sand therapy room for clients of her gran, a practicing child psychotherapist.

While it was simply a playroom for Molly and her cousins at the time, as she became more aware of its true purpose, her interest in sand therapy grew.

She said, “Looking back, it was a huge part of growing up. We just used it to play in but it was my first introduction to art as a form of catharsis.

“My gran used the sand to see how people interacted with it to reveal suppressed emotions, which I found fascinating. 

“Through my final work, I wanted to emphasise that art can be used as a tool to address trauma and healing, and that there can be beauty on the other side of that healing – just like a pearl.”

View Degree Show 2025 online

Work from students studying Animation, Architecture, Art & Philosophy, Digital Interaction Design, Fine Art, Graphic Design, Illustration, Interior & Environmental Design, Jewellery & Metal Design, Product Design, Textile Design, Urban Planning and Environmental Sustainability, is exhibited in the show.

Viewers can also access student exhibits online via the Art & Design Undergraduate Degree Show webpage.