Student art as folk art and the creation of community through aesthetics
Freshers’ Week at the University of Glasgow is not only a sensory blur of new faces and events, but also a sea of paper and pixels. Crossing University Avenue, you’re handed a glossy flyer for a techno night, then immediately a leaflet for an AGM of a newly affiliated society. Inside the cloisters, noticeboards buckle under layers of overlapping A5 sheets, while society Instagram accounts pump out graphics at the pace of a busy newsroom. What emerges is less of an intentional marketing campaign, but more so an accidental exhibition. Club posters, flyers, and society story posts flood your visual field, transforming campus into a gallery of fleeting design.
Each September, certain motifs return to set the scene for the new academic year. GUU and QMU posters lean on big fonts and brash palettes, you can often find hot pinks, neons, harsh contrasts – the brighter the better. Their designs are meant to be legible from ten paces away and to promise memorable events that, truthfully, can be a little unhinged. Oftentimes, the unions and societies rely on eclecticism to invite you to engage with their own visual histories.
For instance, GULA focuses heavily on literary themes – drawing on imagery from your favorite novels like Alice in Wonderland or The Great Gatsby, the society emphasises its own identity through a collective art form. Similarly, the DMIS society presents you with a range of techno-style fonts and digital imagery. Posters and flyers utilize the same motifs as their respective Instagram pages constructing a distinct artistic style which is both digitally and physically displayed in university spaces.
When looking at this wide range of designs one is able to draw parallels between the geometric minimalism found on flyers and the Bauhaus, as well as club night promos and rave-era fonts. It’s as if each group unconsciously draws from an archive of styles, remixing them into a collective visual vocabulary unique to the university.
If you take away the promotional aspect, these posters could stand alone as folk art. Naturally, they’re handmade, usually created by whoever on a committee owns Photoshop or can design something on Canva at 2AM: typos, logos stretched out of proportion, colour clashes that would likely horrify professional designers. These flaws, however, are what give them character, like traditional folk art, their purpose isn’t aesthetic purity but rather communication. These posters are made to be shared and serve as a constant reminder that art is often unintentional, but always communal. Echoing Soviet constructivism – these pieces curate an ephemeral gallery of Glasgow life as, especially during freshers, bright colors and bold fonts dominate campus.
Much like Aleksandr Rodchenko’s “Books!” poster from 1924, Glasgow’s student societies promote their own events using similarly large fonts and enticing imagery, giving student “art” a voice within Glasgow’s cultural scene. Freshers’ posters prove art is meant to intervene in the quotidian, rather than become an inaccessible form of aesthetic purity. Just as Rodchenko’s posters collided text with image and sharp geometries, student Canva collages emulate the same simple and utilitarian aesthetics. Constructivist form is highlighted not only through the purely visual, but the symbolic layering of posters on notice boards and lamp posts. Once the week ends, the storm of posters dissolves, often literally in the Glasgow rain, giving way to a slower cycle of events which occur throughout the year. In this way, Freshers advertising does not simply recall Constructivist form, but also its ephemerality. The symbolism of this sudden flare of collective energy, communicated through an excess of promotional material lies in its ability to briefly reconfigure the university into a utilitarian exhibition.
This temporality is exaggerated with social media; on Instagram, graphics vanish in the feed almost immediately after being posted – the oversaturation of content, though nothing new in the digital age, allows for Freshers’ posts and stories to adapt a form of Constructivism to a modern audience. This defines the unique aesthetic of a truly social form of art, capturing an aesthetic snapshot of the academic year.
Moreover, if someone were to curate an archive of GUU flyers of the 2010s for instance, it would instantly define the era through music, fashion, layouts. These throwaway prints act as time capsules in disguise – adverts curate identities unique not only to Glasgow but the 2020s as well, as each poster signals a different atmosphere, it allows students a choice to identify aesthetic on a personal level, which bridges the “inaccessible” art world with the everyday. Society flyers are designed to recruit anyone who “belongs” playing a huge role in defining one’s own visual identities. The clean, minimalist layouts of career societies suggest professionalism; the chaotic memes of others suggest inclusivity and humor. For first years wandering through the Freshers’ Fair, choosing which flyer to keep is also, in a small way, choosing who you might become.
In this sense, the aesthetics of advertising do as much as the content. GUU and QMU posters hang side by side like rival galleries while society Instagram posts act like digital installations. A student may never attend the advertised event, but the visual identity of its poster still shapes how they understand the culture of the university around them, aligning perfectly with the Constructivist philosophy. Freshers’ week at Glasgow is always remembered for its chaos: too many names, too many events, too many leaflets spilling out of tote bags. But when redefined – it becomes an accidental art festival.
