Grand designs: Falmouth blazes a trail of success

The School of Design at University College Falmouth continues to blaze a trail of success through creative collaborations, innovative projects and successful shows winning national prizes, private commissions and prestigious career placements that deepen and strengthen the reputation of teaching excellence at the College.

BA(Hons) Fashion Design and BA(Hons) Performance Sportswear Design students have secured some of the most sough-after work placements in the fashion industry this summer with major names such as Designer of the Year 2008, Luella Bartley; Founder of Ghost, Tanya Sarne; the rock industry's designer of choice, Todd Lynn; and some of the UK's most prestigious sportswear and ecological fashion houses, Decathlon France based in the South of France; Howies in Wales; and Cornwall's Seasalt and Finisterre.

Recent BA(Hons) Graphic Design graduate, Vicky Barlow gained a First Prize Student Yellow Pencil at the Design & Art Direction (D&AD) awards for the Graphic Design Packaging category for her response to the brief to create packaging and point-of-sale material for Homebase's ‘grow your own' fruit and vegetable range for novice gardeners, whilst Alan Clarke also from BA(Hons) Graphic Design, and Mark Boardman from BA(Hons) Illustration were awarded two of the twenty-five Best New Blood awards at London's Olympia recently.

BA(Hons) Textile Design graduate, Shino Suzuki scooped a prestigious prize at the New Designers Exhibition in July. Shino was awarded the Shelf Award for Embroidery at New Designers, which showcases the best of graduate talent, securing a feature in leading textile magazine, Selvedge, as well as a display in their London retail outlet.

Other BA(Hons) Textile Design graduates have successfully secured commissions to design interior and fashion textiles, and have sold an unprecedented volume of work to private clients. One student's work caught the eye of international online trend company, WSGN for their 2011 trends intelligence images, whilst 2008 graduates, Becky Griffiths and Toria Geary have established their own recycled textiles business, Pretty Rubbish (http://www.prettyrubbish.org/), and have been working on commissions for the National Trust, have been awarded a grant to start up community based swap shops and recycled textile workshops and featured on the Sky History Channel for their work on the Throckmorton coat as part of the 600 years celebration of the Throckmorton family at Coughton Court in Warwickshire.

Both BA(Hons) Textile Design and BA(Hons) Contemporary Crafts at UCF lead the field in their specialist areas by encouraging students to be experimental, to explore new ways of using traditional methods and to find their own artistic voice whilst redefining what textiles and crafts mean in the 21^st Century.

BA(Hons) Contemporary Crafts Course leader, Jason Cleverley, leads by example having collaborated with UCF's iRes (Research into Interactive Art & Design) technologist, Tim Shear, to create an interactive work-table that celebrates the tercentenary of Dr Samuel Johnson. Visitors to the House of Words exhibition in London, where this piece is on show, are invited to engage in the collaborative process of writing a dictionary until 29 August. (For more information, visit http://www.drjohnsonsgarret.net/)

Meanwhile, BA(Hons) Contemporary Crafts graduate, Laura Carnell was highly commended in the Open Competition of the Pewter Live 2009 Awards, an annual design competition run by The Worshipful Company of Pewterers, for her table mats and wine list cover constructed from Brazilian mahogany and delicately inlaid with pewter patterns and second year student, Alice McLean was also commended for her work, Rainy, Change, Fair - a brooch made from wood, pewter and silver inspired by a collaboration of journeys - in the student competition of the Pewter Live 2009 Awards, that attracted more than 100 student entries from across the UK.

In parallel, the work of BA(Hons) 3D Design graduate, Hannes Simon, has been highly commended in the longest running student design awards, The Student Plastics Design Awards, for his pull light, an innovative off-the-grid, wind-up light for short-term use in garages, tents and anywhere that requires bright light, lasting for up to 5 minutes.

Another BA(Hons) 3D Design graduate, Stacey Dix has been making waves at one of the world's largest toy stores, Hamley's. Appointed shortly after her graduation in 2007 as their first in-house designer in their 250-year history, Stacey launches her new in-house toy collection in two phases, at the end of August and in October, aimed exclusively at the under-ten age range.

In BA(Hons) Garden Design, a course that is fundamentally concerned with designing outdoor places through an in-depth exploration of the relationship between art and human habitat and encourages creativity and imagination in the design of sustainable gardens, two successful graduates and winners of the Society of Garden Designers' Student of the Year award, Maren Hallenga and Hugo Bugg have set up their own partnership. Hallenga & Bugg Landscape Design were recently selected from around 100 international entries to create a show garden for Future Gardens, an initiative that kickstarts phase one of the Butterfly World Project in St Albans, launched by Sir David Attenborough and David Bellamy in 2008, which is on show until the end of September. For more information, visit http://www.futuregardens.org/

Closer to home, the Cornwall Garden Society, a charity that aims to promote knowledge, education and best practice in gardening, has generously supported BA(Hons) Garden Design graduate, Chris Parker, with a £2,000 bursary, enabling Chris to complete his degree - something he may not have been able to do without their support.

"We're very proud of the achievements of our students," said Director of School of Design, John Miller. "Year on year they are achieving more and more in terms of awards and in the diversity of employment opportunities our courses are opening up for them. In a difficult time for the economy as a whole, we are ensuring that future opportunities will be available for creative problem-solvers, people who are great at having ideas and innovation. This is what our courses are all about."

There is a limited number of places available on UCF's degree courses in 3D Design and Garden Design, Contemporary Crafts and Spatial Design, Textile Design and Fashion Design, Interior Design and Performance Sportswear Design for October 2009 entry as a result of our ambitious plans to increase our student population in order to achieve Arts University Cornwall by 2012/2013.

To apply to one of these courses through Clearing, please contact www.falmouth.ac.uk/clearing, email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or telephone Admissions on 01326 213730.

University College Falmouth is the only independent Higher Education institution in Cornwall with the powers to award degrees in its own name. It has two campuses in Cornwall - at Woodlane in Falmouth and Tremough in Penryn (which it owns, and jointly manages with the University of Exeter) - and a third campus at Totnes in Devon, following its merger with Dartington College of Arts in 2008.

This merger created a new institution focusing on the expansion of Falmouth's expertise in Art, Design and Media and Dartington's expertise in Choreography, Music, Theatre, Art and Writing. The Devon-based courses will relocate to a new, high-specification Performance Centre at Tremough in 2010, paving the way for a new specialist Arts University in Cornwall by 2012/2013 that will be unique to the South West.

The College is a founding partner in the Combined Universities in Cornwall (CUC), a unique initiative to promote regional economic regeneration through Higher Education, funded mainly by the European Union (Objective One), the South West Regional Development Agency, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, with support from Cornwall Council.

Ends

For further information about University College Falmouth, please contact Jilly Easterby MCIPR, Head of Public Affairs, Telephone: 01326 213792, or email: jilly.easterby@falmouth.ac.uk

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