Exhibition Review: Liverpool Hope University Degree Show 2025
Art in the Maze: Finding Wonder Around Every Corner
Let’s start with a confession. Navigating Crossroads at Liverpool Hope University’s Creative Campus is no small feat. The layout meanders, buildings slip past you, corridors tighten, doors open into places you didn’t expect. It’s part art show, part dream logic. And on a busy early evening, with private view visitors gently jostling through narrow passageways, the sense of disorientation only deepens. But here’s the thing; like all good mazes, there’s treasure at the centre. Lot’s of it.
Crossroads is no ordinary degree show. It’s the collective pulse of a generation of emerging artists, each on the cusp of leaving one world and entering another. The title says it all. What we witness here is both culmination and beginning—a gathering of voices, bold and tentative, raw and refined, all occupying the same living, shifting space.
Each room you stumble into opens up like a revelation. One minute you’re looking at delicate, meditative drawings pinned with quiet reverence to the wall; the next you’re bathed in projection, surrounded by sound, walking through a multi-sensory installation that feels more like a remembered dream than a gallery exhibit. It’s exhilarating—and sometimes overwhelming. But that’s part of the show’s charm. You don’t just look at the work; you move with it, search for it, sometimes even get a little lost inside it.
What impresses most is the sheer variety—not just in medium, but in mood. Some works are stripped back and intimate, others unapologetically ambitious, others displaying deliberate darkness. There’s no one house style here—just the thrum of individual voices coming into their own. And while not everything lands perfectly (what degree show ever does?), there’s a bravery in the doing, a refusal to play it safe. A commitment to the collective future.
One piece can be a visceral meditation on violence and discomfort, another a bold, gestural work, a deliberate act of appropriation and recontextualization, transforming everyday ephemera into a statement piece. Elsewhere, we find fragments of autobiography, quiet explorations of gender, memory, place. A sketchbook left open becomes as powerful as a finished sculpture.
A word to the wise: one visit won’t do. Crossroads is generous, sprawling, full of corners you’ll miss the first time round. It rewards return, reflection, re-immersion. The exhibition runs until 22 June and I, for one, will be going back, map or no map. But this time I will have a St Bernard on stand-by…
Crossroads
Liverpool Hope University 2025 Degree Show
Creative Campus
Running until Sunday 22 June 2025
