Eyes on the Goldsmiths Prize as award trophy is unveiled

Students from the Department of Design have unveiled this year’s Goldsmiths Prize trophy after completing the gong just before it is handed out.

Third year BA (Hons) Design scholars Tom Wagstaff and Matt Williams made the aluminium and concrete award in the studios at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The finishing touches were applied to the prize days before the award ceremony on 11 November 2015 at Foyles, Charing Cross Road.

The designers spent 60 hours planning and making the award - and wanted to experiment with the traditional form of such trophies by using “semi-architectural” materials. 

Tom explained: “We wanted to use materials that aren’t traditionally associated with these types of awards and materials that are specific to our own personal practice in some way.

 “As designers engaged in the urban realm, the materials are semi- architectural and the form works on multiple scales, it could be a 1:25 or 1:100 model while also working 1:1. Despite the industrial nature of the materials there is an elegance and fragility to the design.  

He added: “The design is an abstraction of the Goldsmiths Prize’s logo, we created a jig of the form but didn’t fully press it into the aluminium. We felt it important that the form was dictated by the original motif but didn’t replicate it and this process materialises this idea.

For us it was a great opportunity to collaborate on something detached from our studio work and spend time creating something refined and finished.

He added: “We have always said that design as a discipline has soft edges and it was great to experience in this instance how design was feeding from and into another academic practice.

 

Six authors have been shortlisted for the £10,000 prize which celebrates fiction at its most novel.

The works shortlisted are:

Beatlebone by Kevin Barry, published by Canongate

Acts of the Assassins by Richard Beard, published by Harvill Secker

The Field of the Cloth of Gold by Magnus Mills, published by Bloomsbury

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy, published by Cape

Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, published by Faber & Faber

Lurid & Cute by Adam Thirlwell, published by Cape

 

The two previous winners of the awards are Eimear McBridge with A Girl is a Half-formed Thing in 2013 and Ali Smith for How To Be Both in 2014.