New Designers

Yesterday I went to New Designers 2014, an exhibition in London's Business Design Centre where art colleges show off the best stuff made by students in their final year.

I've organised and attended a lot of boring trade shows in my working life so I needed some  convincing that going to New Designers was worthwhile.

It was!   The quality of a lot of the work on show was really high, it was great to talk to graduates about their work and I came away from the show with lots of ideas for future projects.

A lot of the show was taken up with textiles and jewellery (not my thing, really) but there was still enough glass, ceramics, metalwork and other stuff to keep me interested all day.

Here's a list of the stuff I looked at, in the order in which I encountered it.

Sophie Southgate.  Hemispheres with different geometric hollows cut out of them.  Just loved the texture on the outside surface.  Must find out how to do this!

 Christina Bolt.  Worn bricks etc that she "repairs" with gold leaf etc.   Made me think about using worn brick, glass etc from the beach.

Arthur Goodfellow  Ceramic boxes, probably slip cast, that he distorts while they're still plastic.

Emilia Netto   Interesting experiments pouring molten pewter into a silicon mould (from Tiranti) that can withstand that sort of heat

Amber King  Great idea!  Putting stuff between 2 sheets of glass to form a panel.  Amber smashed up bubbles she'd blown but other things would look good, too.  And you could use redundant double glazing frames!

Susan Ratcliff  Clever ways of adding glass to existing objects - cameras, old garden tools - to express some deeply held emotions.  The bubbles had images of an old eye infirmary etched on to them - was something about sight.

Steph Sykes.  A hot glass project that reminded me of my "Faces" one - i.e. dozens of clones.

Rita Griskonyte  Cast glass.  Modelled people in clay. Then smashed up the model and made a cast glass version of the result.

Terri Harper  Screen that incorporates post cards and other memorabilia about one of Terri's ancestors (great grandmother?)  who had an exciting life spanning two World Wars.

Ainsley Francis  Incorporating lenses into objects and doing a lot of lathe work in glass to create "camera obscura" effects, dealing with identity issues.   

Charlotte Smith Blows big bubbles onto logs with cut outs in them.  The signs of burning are hidden under the glass.

Faith Mercer  Studied the beauty of mould at a microscopic level by working with microbiologists at her college.  Translated some of the textures into glass and used them inside some blown objects.  I really like the idea of looking at living organisms at a microscopic level and replicating them on a large scale.  A follow up for me.

Richard T Roberts  Nice cast glass.  Wondered how he got all the plaster out of this one:

Emma Vaughan  Laser cut layers of copper, perspex, plywood etc.  Also had an enormous copper "necklace" on show.  I really liked her layer type wall hangings replicating the patterns made by water on sand:  

Diane Soltys.  Loved her rather ghoulish piglets:

William Rolls  Lovely ceramic dogs, full of life.  I didn't get to talk to William.

Chloe Georgakis  Very interesting stuff on growing crystals and generating electricity, inside organic looking glass shapes, so that it's "living art".  Might be an idea for the sustainability assignment I have to do in the future.  You could have a debate about whether this is really art.

Danae Dasyra Another display looking like a lab experiment, this time showing a sort of mobile based on elementary type electric motors.  Unfortunately it works on a voltage that wasn't permitted in the exhibition, so it wasn't operating.  Another idea for the sustainability assignment?

Jenny Ayrton  Sand-cast glass with lovely inclusions in them.

Kensuke Nakata exploring Japanese stoicism by making thousands of porcelain petals in a simple way, tingeing them with colour, and then assembling them on stacked circular kiln shelves.

A very productive day.  I'll return next year.