Commissioned by YPC
A trail of billboards, hoardings & spaces across the city
V&A Dundee’s Young People’s Collective (YPC), together with JACK ARTS Scotland, presents Commissioned by YPC – a new series of public artworks by four emerging artists and designers selected from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design’s 2025 Degree Show.
Curated and produced by YPC, a collective of emerging creatives who have nurtured and driven the commissions, installed on hoardings and billboards across Dundee, bringing contemporary design practice directly into the city’s streets.
Each artist and designer works in their own unique way to respond to the theme of Reimagining Gardens—considering how gardens and public spaces can act as platforms for social justice, biodiversity and sustainability.
In partnership with JACK ARTS, part of BUILDHOLLYWOOD Scotland.
As part of our Upstart: Creative Careers Festival, take a look at the full programme here.
Finn Millar
Thistle 274
Outside DJCAD, Perth Road, DD1 4HT
Finn Millar draws connections between Scotland and Palestine through nature, reflecting the twinning of Dundee and Nablus. The thistle, a symbol of national pride in both regions, becomes a shared emblem of resistance. In Palestine, the Akoub thistle — native to its mountains — is illegal for Palestinians to harvest, with a jail sentence of up to 3 years, yet it continues to be gathered for its medicinal as well as its spiritual and cultural significance, turning the unassuming little plant into a symbol of resistance. Titled after the quote “They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds,” the work honours 274 journalists killed in Gaza in the current genocide, revealing their names as viewers tear away QR-coded strips leading to further resources and ways to support Palestine.
As a political/activist artist, Finn Millar uses art as a tool to communicate ideas, raise awareness and educate on social issues. He grew up observant of how social environments reacted in response to the politics of the time, being raised by openly politically engaged parents who cultivated critical thinking, curiosity and most importantly empathy. Finn incorporates creative techniques to engage audiences with social issues that they otherwise, may be wary to approach. Through collective learning, he believes art can be one of the most effective ways in harbouring positive societal change .
Cara Murray
Is math am buachail an oidhche; bheir i dhachaidh gach beothach 'us duine / Night is a good herdsman; she brings all creatures home
Cowgate Underpass, DD1 2JJ
Celebrating the turn toward the darker half of the year, Cara Murray’s work honours the Gaelic festival of Samhain —‘summer’s end’ — a time when the veil between worlds is said to grow thin. Drawing on photography and archival imagery, Cara includes a portrait of her mother embodying the Cailleach, a towering, mythic woman central to Samhain lore, alongside archival images reflecting Scotland’s long tradition of guising — the practice of dressing up and going door-to-door.
Situated in the Cowgate Underpass, the installation transforms the urban passage into a spiritual threshold between this world and the next. By occupying a public outdoor space, Cara bridges the real and the imagined, weaving Scottish folklore through the textures of a contemporary landscape.
Cara Murray is a Scottish artist originally from the Highlands, now based in Margate. She considers herself a sculptor and friend of the snails. Her work is centered around an interest in the relationship of the embodied self and the natural world and how the two merge into and shape each other.
Leyla Hussain
Lost in Translation
Location, Authersrone Terrace, DD4 6RT & George Orwell Bar, Perth Road, DD1 4JS
Spanning two sites — from Stobswell, to Perth Road — this project explores Dundee’s shifting racial and class dynamics, past and present. For Leyla, the work is deeply personal: “It was important for me to tell my story — how moving just forty minutes away changed me.” Through her installations, she responds to ignorance and xenophobia with honesty and empathy.
The title Stobie Zindabad, blends the Dundonian nickname Stobie with the slogan Pakistan Zindabad (‘Long Live Pakistan’), expressing national pride and solidarity. The phrase cleverly unites cultural identity, language and place, speaking to the highly charged political moment we inhabit. The dandelion she uses, common to both Scotland and Pakistan yet often dismissed as a weed, becomes a quiet symbol of resilience and belonging.
Leyla Hussain is a Scottish-Pakistani from Dundee and is currently based there. Hussain is an installation artist, currently specialising in metalwork sculpture and graphic markmaking inspired by Arabic and Urdu calligraphy, and esoteric symbols. She creates works and environments that have a presence, a sense of catharsis, grief and hope. Her work communicates through a veil, known to no one but speaks to many.
Liv Rodgers
Framed Eden
Euclid Cresent, DD1 1AA
Liv Rodgers reimagines the walled garden for today’s city, transforming the billboard into a framed surface where unfamiliar growth takes root. Traditionally spaces of privilege and control, walled gardens become here a site of queer potential — places of intimacy, secrecy, and transformation.
Liv layers drawing, collage and AI generated textures to merge the organic with the synthetic. The result is a landscape that feels both lush and uncanny, questioning how environments — and identities — are cultivated or contained. A QR code embedded in the work leads viewers beyond the billboard, extending the garden into a shifting digital space.
Liv Rodgers is an artist whose work imagines transhumanist visions of a botanical future, where organic and synthetic forms intertwine. Through layered botanical imagery, she creates compositions that feel both familiar and otherworldly, bringing something unnatural into the real world. Her process is fast-paced and intuitive, marked by bold colour, material experimentation, and the influence of digital media and AI as both tool and subject. Text emerges as fragmented self-reflection, echoing the layered nature of my visuals. Each piece is part of an ongoing cycle—fluid, evolving, and inviting viewers to encounter the uncanny within the everyday.
Kyle Watson
21 Things
Volk Gallery, The Keiller Centre
Volk Gallery presents the work of Kyle Watson. Kyle has produced a series of prints, reflecting on time spent in Dundee whilst studying at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. Each edition highlights a visual detail of our city, with its many textures, shapes and patterns. Kyle asks us to take our time, to celebrate the tiny design details that are all around us everyday... until they aren't.
Volk Gallery is a non-institutional arts venue based in Dundee. Consisting of a repurposed mechanical vending machine, Volk Gallery is hung in the publicly accessible locale of the Keiller Centre. A rotation of editions are dispensed at a set price of £3 each. Works are completed by commissioned artists and change (roughly) monthly.
JACK ARTS, BUILDHOLLYWOOD Scotland
JACK ARTS specialise in creating inspiring street campaigns and experiences for the culture space. Working with galleries, exhibitions, publishers, institutions, and local clients, their team understand the arts, the audience and the need to be truly creative, not just claim to be. They believe city streets offer a unique canvas and context to showcase campaigns that connect with an informed and creative audience. That is why they curate, fund and promote their own series of Your Space Or Mine projects, giving artists and creatives a platform on the streets to connect with neighborhoods and communities. With a portfolio of carefully curated poster sites in 11 cities across the UK via their parent company BUILDHOLLYWOOD, and a creative team that can produce bespoke creative billboards, hand painted murals, interactive installations, ambient and unique experiential marketing campaigns, JACK ARTS is perfectly placed to promote the arts on the streets.
