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The Graduate Exhibition of the TU Dublin School of Creative Arts is the highlight of the academic year for our students and staff. This online catalogue represents the culmination of many years of full time study and gives our students the opportunity to showcase the results of their imagination, hard work and creative skills in a public arena. The exhibition features work from all our programmes and highlights the exciting and innovative range of work produced by our graduates across Fine Art, Furniture, Product, Interior, Visual Merchandising, Visual Communication Design and Creative and Cultural Industries.

The 2022 exhibition is particularly special as it is the first opportunity we have had to invite the public to our brand new East Quad Arts building and give everyone a chance to see our magnificent new studios and workshops.

The identity and design of this year’s exhibition, catalogue and website was created by Visual Communication students Marwa Noelle Ali, Conor Rice and Aisling Hannon. Their design uses manipulated type to illustrate the progression from individual broken up pixels to full letterforms, to represent the coming together of the final year cohort in the post pandemic era.

Launch June 2, 6pm
Open Daily June 3—11, 10am—5pm
East Quad, TU Dublin, Grangegorman, Dublin 7

Kayleigh O'Toole

My name is Kayleigh O’Toole. I am a final year visual merchandising and display student; I enjoy design and making. Through this course, I have been able to allow my creativity and skills to grow through being able to explore different skills and methods of creating. I have recently completed my internship in Kilkenny design. I have enjoyed working in different teams and learned a considerable amount about myself and visual merchandising in a fast-paced and changing environment.

Back to the roots

My final year major project was an in-store display for Kilkenny design. I gained inspiration from the WGSN spring-summer trend resourceful, which is all about minimalism and focuses on less is better, nature, new beginnings, encouraging self-care while not feeling guilty, and meaningful handcrafted design. Therefore, I have created a wellness window for my installation using inspiration from the resourceful trend and the Handmade Soap Company; a wellness brand stocked in Kilkenny. These handmade products focus on their ingredients. I went with the concept of focusing on the simplicity of a product and how it originated. I wanted to keep this display minimal and bring it back to nature through my two-dimensional floral drawings inspired by the products’ ingredients. I wanted to keep this display minimal and bring in nature through simple line drawings. The colours of the drawings link to the packaging, and also the trending colours of the season. The faux grass floor created a botanical garden inspired display packed full of hand-drawn flowers and handmade products. I wanted my display to grab the attention of all ages as it has been something Kilkenny have been working on with trying to attract a younger target market, particularly with their wellness brands at the moment.

Home to Hollywood

This was my submission for my fashion and branding module in third year, for which we had to investigate a brand of our choice. Each brand was researched in detail in terms of their values, target market, and brand as a whole. From this research, I designed a three-dimensional rendered model of a window installation designed for the brand’s flagship store and roll-out windows which will launch their spring-summer collection.

For my fashion and branding module, I chose Balenciaga. This brand has consistently been at the forefront of fashion, and it is a powerhouse in the high-end fashion world and changing the game with each collection they release. For my design, I want to embody the brand from the beginning to now and showcase how Balenciaga is a brand that can bring you from home to Hollywood. Balenciaga makes you feel glamourous and powerful no matter what you are doing through their eclectic mix of tuxedo wear blended with streetwear. For my design, I wanted to create a reinterpretation of the ever-classical photocall opportunity on the Hollywood red carpet. The mannequins descend an iconic Hollywood staircase. I felt that this was the best way to launch the spring-summer collection to show that Balenciaga is not only Avant-Garde gowns; they are now blurring the lines between occasion wear and street wear while making you confident in whatever you choose.