Mullen Lowe Group and Central Saint Martins award latest creative stars at Lowe Nova Awards
Mullen Lowe Group China have announced the winner and runners-up of the 2015 Lowe Nova awards – an awards programme created five years ago, in partnership with Central Saint Martins, that recognises fresh, creative talent. Central Saint Martins is one of the world’s premier art and design schools, with alumni consisting of creative leaders including Laure Prouvost, John Galliano, Alexander McQueen and Ricardo Tisci.
The Lowe Nova awards narrowed down over a thousand pieces of work from graduating students to a shortlist of just 15. The 2015 shortlist consists of students from all over the world, including Kazakhstan, Ukraine, China and Saudi Arabia, with much of their work containing cultural implications from their home countries.
The awards continue to elevate with each passing year, and “are now established as a major event in the Central Saint Martins year, celebrating as they do the most exceptional work from across the college. Over the years, the shortlist and winners of the awards provide an important and fascinating record of the work emerging from one of the world’s leading art and design schools”, said Professor Jeremy Till, Head of Central Saint Martins and Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Arts London.
This year’s winner is Liberty Antonia Sadler (BA Performance Design and Practice) from the UK (pictured above), whose work with mediums of illustration and moving image explores issues of 21st century body politics. Her work dives into the experience of living in a female body in a ‘photo-shopped’ world that dictates the new visual rhetoric of perfection through digital manipulation. Working within a socio-political context, her work uses character and playfulness to discuss themes of food, femininity and sexuality.
The runners-up are ‘Jelly’ Jialin Deng from China (work top left) and Hugo Cantegrel from France.
Deng (MA Narrative Environments) conducted a series of experimental interactive dining events providing multi-sensory experiences. The aim was to create sensory stimuli for several senses simultaneously, specifically taste and hearing, that are normally experienced separately, generating a kind of synaesthesia. (work pictured below left)
Cantegrel (BA Fine Art) aims to create a visual experience that translates a narrative through relations of objects within an installation, ‘we can look at objects in a house as an installation in a gallery and the world reveals its poetry, its musicality, its theatricality’ – the artist says.
“We see these awards as an investment in emerging creative talent, where our support and encouragement can help provide a platform for these individuals to go on and influence the rest of the world,” commented Jose Miguel Sokoloff, President, Mullen Lowe Group Global Creative Council.
The following students from China and Taiwan were selected among the shortlist:
Georgia (Yuwen) Xue – China
MA Character Animation
Her short film tells a story of several different people who contemplatively reflect on their own past and life in general while being at the threshold of death.
Pan Wang – China
MA Industrial Design
Wang has designed ‘Memetery’, a location-based digital cemetery that retains the memory of a deceased person as digital data.
Jim Hsting – Taiwan
BA Fashion Womenswear
Jim Hsting’s collection ‘XI’ explores the relations between cause and effect, inside and outside, chaos and order.