Opening on Saturday at the Adelaide Central Gallery and the school’s heritage campus at Glenside, the exhibition will feature work by 30 graduating Bachelor of Visual Art (honours) and Bachelor of Visual Art students.

Adelaide Central School of Art CEO Ingrid Kellenbach says there is a sense of wonderment in the students’ art, which spans media including painting, drawing, sculpture, mixed-media, installation, textiles, film, ceramics, performance and photography.

“They have the confidence to explore things they want to say about themselves and their lives.

“This year, it’s a lot about gender and women … but the way they interpret that takes completely different forms. The works are quite complex.”

While Kate O’Boyle draws on her experience of a Catholic upbringing to explore how women’s bodies are viewed and appropriated, Honours student Alycia Bennett uses video and performance to respond to the fracturing of public and private space in the digital world.

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“She’s really looking at exploring the gendered experience of online public space … the power relationship within the digital reach,” Kellenbach says of Bennett.

“She’s also looking at protecting the self from surveillance.”

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Lucia Dohrmann has found inspiration in traditional skills such as hand sewing and crochet, which her mother taught her as a child, to create abstract paintings with a tactile element. In her work which illustrates the cover of the exhibition catalogue (and is also pictured below), she has painstakingly unravelled part of the canvas.

Among the more colourful works on show are those by Erin Glazebrook, who has borrowed from the imagery of TV show The Simpsons to create an installation which seeks to evoke a feeling of nostalgia and care-free adolescence. It includes “soft sculptures” such as a lamp, sofa and phone.

“They are just so amusing that you can’t help but smile at them,” Kellenbach says.

Other works include surreal self-portraits and “ancestral mythological portraits”, digital paintings exploring recovery from mental illness, ceramic sculptures that tell a personal story of navigating loss, and paintings that depict workers who have become casualties of the tech revolution.

For many of the graduates, it will be the first time they have shown their work in public, and Kellenbach says the exhibition marks a “significant transition” in their artistic careers.

The exhibition will be officially opened on Saturday at an event where the school will also announce awards for high-achieving students.

Last week at the Art Gallery of SA, final-year Master of Arts (Curatorial and Museum Studies) student Gabrielle Lane was named as the inaugural recipient of a new emerging curator award which will see her given the opportunity to curate an exhibition in the school’s 2018 program.

A selection of the works showing in the 2017 Graduate Exhibition: