Students, alumni and academics from the department of Visual Arts and Design have a long history of winning awards for their work which is making an impact on the creative industries all over the world. Here’s just a snapshot of some of the notable successes the Visual Arts and Design departments have enjoyed over the last couple of years.
Olaolu Slawn, who studied graphic design at Middlesex, is a Nigerian-born London-based artist known for collaborations with Skepta, Central Cee and the late Virgil Abloh. Slawn designed the new Brit Awards statuette inspired by tri-faced The Living Tribunal – a character from the Marvel comics. Slawn’s statue in bronze has three expressions, representing ‘Opportunity’, ‘Gratitude’ and ‘Celebration’.
Our award-winning staff and students include Animation Director of Programmes Jonathan Hodgson, a two-time BAFTA winner, recent grad Gemma Schnable who won a Breakthrough award for her short film Dysmorphia and Animation student Jordan-Leigh Campbell who won a motion graphics competition set by an anti-knife crime campaign.
Fashion Textiles and Design BA student Mihai-Eugen Popescu won the 2022 Fashion Design Research competition, a collaboration between the British Fashion Council and the British Library. Popescu’s research project celebrates fashion craft practices and carries the positive message “you can be gay, Romanian, traditional, whatever”. The £3,000 competition prize will go towards developing Popescu’s final year collection.
Illustration BA student Betty Kim produced the animated film To Be Or Not To Be about suicide and depression. To Be Or Not To Be won a prize by Creative Conscience, an international organisation dealing with world social issues. Her portfolio of work was also chosen by D&AD as a contender in the New Blood Awards. Kim has gone on to focus full-time on her creative career and exhibit work in event spaces and do artist talks and workshops.
The Active Energy project won an award for knowledge exchange at the ‘Oscars of Higher Education’, the Times Higher Education Awards 2022 in London. The initiative, led by Dr Lorraine Leeson Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, began 15 years ago to bring together young and old through their passion for engineering and design. The winning team of engineers have worked with a retired men’s club called the Geezers Club to generate renewable energy by designing waterwheels driven by tidal flows. Waterwheels also pump air into the water to help fish and wildlife. The Active Energy team have now developed and tested a prototype turbine for the Thames.
Artist and MDX PhD graduate Heather Phillipson produced a limited-edition print for WWF's Art for Your World campaign – a call to action for the cultural sector to come together and demand urgent measures against climate change ahead of the COP26 summit.
In the graphic novel she wrote and illustrated as her final year project, Florian Grossey examines the atrocity committed against the people of the Chagos Islands by the British Government. The illustrations move from full colour to sepia to black and white to evoke the islanders’ brutal experiences and poor living conditions.
Allana’s outstanding book cover of Bill Bryson’s very popular ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ shone through the competition. She is now working as a design assistant at Penguin Random House!
The BIID Student Design Challenge is an annual, day-long competition for final year university students of interior design and interior architecture. The team that represented MDX reimagined a dynamic new space for the Topshop flagship store on Oxford Street.
Got questions about what it’s like to be part of our award-winning creative community? Head to Unibuddy where you can chat to current students and academic staff.
