Building Forum Award

I think it's probably a good thing that I've been taken down a couple of pegs by failing to win any of the five of the competitions I entered during the summer.

I feel suitably chastened, although I'll carry on entering competitions whenever the opportunity arises - they're a great way of pushing myself and getting a brutal assessment of my work.  

This post is about the "Building of the Year" award for the Building Forum for Devon and Cornwall - one of two competitions signalled in  college email on 20th August.  

The brief did a lot of stipulating.  In particular, the award had to use the colours and shapes on the award page of the Building Forum website... 

 ...and it had to include the full names of the award and Forum.  The prize was £200.

The colour, shape and lettering requirements hemmed me in quite a bit.  Also, I didn't want to commit to anything that would be difficult, time-consuming or stressful to make in the fairly short timeframe - the deadline for completing the award was the end of October. 

Eventually, I hit on the idea of creating a geometric pattern from the shapes, using enamels.  In that way, I could send away for a decal of the design, apply it to a glass plate that I could buy for a few pounds, and then fire it.  Job done!

I don't feel too bad about losing this competition because the winner was Adam Johns,  a Plymouth College of Art graduate whose hot glass work I've seen and admired (see previous post).  Here's his design:

If I had been assessing submissions I would have picked this over my offering myself.

Adam used the same concept, with the same result (i.e. winning) for the Abercrombie Awards, the other competition in the college email mentioned earlier.  I'll write about that one in a separate post.

Lessons

• I think my design was quite clever and quite striking given all the stipulations about what it should incorporate.
•  I think its implementation on a bought-in plate was its weakness.   However,  it was right for me - I didn't want to be drawn into a complicated production process.  
• It's tough to compete against hot glass for awards.  If you're capable ( as Adam is and I'm not) then it looks as though it's possible to produce a beautifully polished 3D item fairly quickly and thus cost effectively. 
• Conventional cast glass is a non-starter for awards as I've discovered on previous projects - see the orienteering and running awards I made.  They take a long time to make, the materials are expensive and grinding/polishing can get stressful.  
• I still think there's some potential in making awards by pouring molten glass into moulds - see my "simpler" running awards.  However I failed to win a competition using this approach for the Association of Colleges "Gold" awards earlier this year -  I'll write about it some time.