The Overspill is the Degree Show exhibition by Nina B, the recipient of three awards this year: the Alan Woods Memorial Prize, the Bernard Cooper Memorial Prize, and Drawing Projects UK’s award for a graduating student of DJCAD.
The artist’s hometown of Livingston is the subject of The Overspill, telling The Jute Journal:
‘A lot of my experiences there didn’t align with this optimistic vision that they had when they built them.’
The works are a reflection upon the ideals of the New Town scheme, enacted in post-war Scotland for people to move out of overcrowded Glasgow, and their contrast to the current reality of ‘managed decline.’
As with the rest of the country, Livingston has a changing urban landscape. Residents are affected by safety concerns over RAAC—a building material that may degrade without proper maintenance. For instance, Dundee’s DUSA Building has been partially sealed off since 2023 as a precaution for containing RAAC.
The legacy of Livingston and the new towns’ utopian ambitions to house the ‘overspill people’ amidst today’s boarded-up and collapsing architecture is interrogated via layered prints. The artist tells TJJ that the process is one of ‘deconstructing imagery.’
The artist set up two giant screenprints of rubble with aluminium scaffolding, a pallet, and a block of aerated concrete. Aside from mimicking the rubble in the screenprint, the setup’s concrete block has been repeatedly chipped to reflect the fragility of such built environments.
Behind this leviathan, we see some of the artist’s smaller prints. ‘I usually take videos and then I use stills from the videos,’ the artist says, ‘I just find that more organic than photography.’
The stills of Livingston are then printed, usually in A5 format, ripped up, and then put together and scaled up for a collage-esque effect. The result is a conflict between the architecture’s perceived brutal solidity and underlying fragility.
The award-winning works certainly invite us to consider the sustainability of our landscapes and future.
You can check out Nina B’s work @bluekidneybean_art on Instagram and the portfolio website linked here.