V&A Illustration Awards 2009: Student Category

Part of the V&A Illustration Awards, the Student Illustrator category offers prizes for unpublished illustration. Anybody who attended an illustration course at any time during 2007 or 2008 was eligible for the student category of the competition this year.

The 2009 Student Illustrator category was judged by Brett Ryder - illustrator and overall winner of last year's awards, and Paul Gravett - writer, curator and lecturer on international comics.

Student Winner 2009

Lydia Wong

Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London

'My work is composed from collages of digitally manipulated illustrations and photos. It tends to be research driven. Content is pivotal in shaping the moods, themes and imageries I use. I enjoy employing symbolism and metaphorical elements to express the questions and opinions that arise in my investigations. Symbolist painter Odilon Redon and digital artist Ray Ceasar have both had a strong influence on the way I view illustrations in terms of style, content and technique.

Everything Turns to Gold explores issues of nationalism and censorship in China. The tiger has become a symbol of enforcement, and in the context of my work gold has also come to describe the fervent, almost blind nationalism shaping today's youth.

My work draws heavily on socialist realism in communist propaganda posters, which in itself is a form of censorship of the lives of the people it paints. I have attempted to recreate surreal and seemingly happy facades, while letting a much eerier and darker context shine through. The artworks' 'plastic-y' feel reflects my feelings of the image China is projecting of itself. I also attempt to parallel Renaissance religious paintings by using multiple human figures to occupy the same space, unified by an event, although upon closer inspection we notice they are mostly dissociated. This also mirrors my feelings that while the Chinese may be bonded together by themes of nationalism, underneath lies a segregated society, each plagued with their own social woes'.

View Lydia Wong's website

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'.