STUDENT WINNER 2009

Student Runner-Up 2009

Kristina Marie Hofmann

Royal College of Art, London

'I like to treat a creative problem in a similar way a Detective attempts to solve a case.
Identifying the problems, speaking to the people involved, sourcing the materials, piecing the puzzle together and documenting the process thoroughly along the way.
This analogy seems appropriate because I am reluctant to be constrained to two dimensions.

I believe that even the clever depiction of a tactile element that we long to touch and feel can heighten our sensibility towards an image, using tactile matter to create printed or moving images has therefore become an essential part of my work

The inspiration for this series of illustrations came from Anna Kavan's novel Ice. The novel is known to be a literary slipstream, characterized by its ambiguity and nebulous jumps in time and place.

The narrator, a man known as 'the warden', searches for an elusive girl in a frozen apocalyptic landscape. I built a model of this  world, with the characters, the woods and roads, the pylons and ships next to selected words and phrases that particulary grabbed me. Depending on the angle you look at (and photograph) the model, the context - and therefore the image of the scene you are looking at - changes. Every single element was then hand dipped into gloss paint to glue the world together and give it the dark and gloomy feel that captivated me reading the story.

The world Kavan portrays is more and more taken over by an unstoppable mass of Ice that buries everything and everyone. I tried to capture this by placing the model into a huge tank filled with water and slowly freezing it. The more the ice covers the elements, the more unclear and misty the image becomes'.

Visit Kristina Marie Hoffman's website

Winning Illustration: Ice

Giclee prints