The University of Edinburgh Art Collection has acquired the work of three 2025 Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) graduating students, who are recipients of the annual Graduate Show Purchase Prize.
Works by Esther Forse, Eilidh McKeown (both MA (Hons) Fine Art) and Tammy McMaster Stewart (BA (Hons) Intermedia) will be added to the University’s Art Collection, and as recipients of the prize, each artist will be awarded a fixed fee. The process also involved engaging with the University’s Art Collection curatorial team to decide on which aspect of their Graduate Show would be collected.
The selection of the 2025 prize recipients was made by staff from the University’s Heritage Collections department, specifically the Art Collection curatorial team and their Collections Management colleagues, with input from ECA teaching staff and external peers.
Art Collection Curator for the University, Julie-Ann Delaney, said: “As always, we were incredibly impressed by the high standard of work produced by the ECA graduates, and we are absolutely delighted to be able to work with Esther, Eilidh and Tammy on the acquisition of their work. We are excited about weaving the works into future teaching and research plans, and look forward to continuing our conversations with each of the artists, and following the next steps in their careers.”
Esther Forse
The Art Collection has acquired the painting Disaster Painting 2, and the work's associated study, from Esther.
Beginning with found imagery of model villages and film sets taken from old postcards and archives, Esther painstakingly creates meticulous paintings which generate a haunted or uncanny feeling.
Esther makes a range of editing decisions when translating the found imagery to final painting, including removing all people - real or model – and leaving behind only their shadows and reflections; further imbuing the works with an ominous sense that something beyond the grasp of the viewer has, or is about to, occur.
The artist has said of her source material: “In film sets and model villages, the utopian and often unfeasibly beautiful coexists with the presence of disaster, condensing societal dreams and nightmares into miniature and temporary form. Architecturally, they often recreate—in an ideologically weighted and idealised way—the past, or a version of the past, for our entertainment: and so allow me to look at how history is played out, fictionalised, and reformed in the present. Inside this utopianism, disaster imagery often breaks out, particularly in the motif of the house on fire (or fake fire), burning continuously without being consumed.”
Visit Esther's portfolio on the ECA Graduate Show website
Eilidh McKeown
The Art Collection is acquiring two works from Eilidh’s wider Graduate show installation Parley: including the aluminium sculpture Co-operation and Emulation, not Competition i. and the acrylic yarn work Supporters Scarves (UNITED WE STAND, DIVIDED WE FALL), both from 2025.
Made directly with women in the Fauldhouse community in West Lothian, Supporters Scarves will be included within a community gala event in the area in mid-June, before joining the collection for use in research and teaching shortly thereafter.
McKeown has stated that the installation: “Aims to counter narratives of division by existing as the record of an active dialogue and collaborative creative engagement with mining communities in West Lothian [where the artist is from], re-engaging and celebrating histories of collective resistance and social justice in times of sustained economic crisis.”
Eilidh’s Graduate Purchase Prize has been generously supported with additional funds from Friends of Edinburgh University Visual Arts (FEUVA).
Visit Eilidh's portfolio on the ECA Graduate Show website
Tammy McMaster Stewart
Working predominantly within film, spoken word, collage and sculpture, two works by Tammy will be joining the collection.
The first is the moving image work a woman at her worst which was made by the artist over the course of a year and features imagery from a variety of journeys taken across the Scottish landscape, shot on an iPhone and digital camera. Overlaying this is a spoken word narrative developed from text written by Stewart, composed of carefully gathered and generated individual lines mined from conversation and snippets of everyday life, as well as the artist’s own subtle references to the history of the Edinburgh College of Art.
Voiced by the artist, as well as by the actor Gavin Mitchell, the spoken narrative explores some of the key preoccupations in Tammy’s practice, including the themes of gender and class, with the accompanying imagery connecting to her interest in land boundaries and transitions. The final third of the video features a piano composition produced by musician and composer Andrew Carvel, made in direct response to the works themes and visuals.
Alongside the video, the collection will also be acquiring a cast bronze ring, Do I? (2025) which is engraved with the word ‘hen’. A work which is exploring language and process, it further demonstrates Tammy’s interest in the wordplay connected to Scottish class dynamics.
