Inspired by

For the sake of completeness I'm going to make a quick mention of my submissions to the V&A's "Inspired by" competition, both of which were failures:

Light Waves

 While I was doing an evening course in glass at Plymouth College of Art, I submitted this:

Entries have to be inspired by something in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

In this case, the starting point was Edmund de Waal's "Signs and Wonders" installation - objects that de Waal made in response to his favourite exhibits in the ceramics galleries which he arranged in a steel channel running beneath the dome above the museum's entrance.

I started out planning to make a small section of the channel in cast glass on to which I would place my own objects.   However, I couldn't see how to cast it as a single piece so I sliced up the channel into segments.   I then decided to make the top flange curl over like a breaking wave and abandon the idea of placing objects inside the channel.

After I'd made the wave segments I played around with how to present them and decided they needed to be placed over a hollow cast plinth and with very bright lights in it.   The very bright lights turned into 72 light emitting diodes on strips.

For more about this project, please click here.

In retrospect, I did a really poor job of grinding and polishing the glass on this project so that might be one reason why I got rejected.

Faces

This was a study of facial expressions and the emotions and attitudes they convey.  I produced it for  the "Artist-Designer-Maker" assignment at college:

This wasn't really inspired by an exhibit in the V&A but I pretended it evolved from "A Captive Audience?" by David Reekie.  It has similarities - identical figures in an array, one different from the rest etc.

For more about my Faces project, please click here.

I wasn't terribly happy with the outcome.  Also, I got a photography student to take the shots that I sent in to the competition and I think they could have been better.

Lessons

• I should have looked at what won in previous years, to steer my choice of topic
• Put a lot more thought into photography
• Be more genuine about picking an exhibit as the starting point for a project