Undercover critics exposé

ART critics who ‘went undercover’ at MMU’s Art & Design Degree Show 2010 have confessed to being hugely impressed.

Professional architects, designers, curators and critics visited the annual shows of 25 top design schools in Britain.

And they feature around 60 of the “most imaginative” projects in Blueprint Magazine.

Five of the selected elite were from Manchester School of Architecture (MSA) and MMU School of Design.

Critic Graham Modlen singled out Steve Connah’s work which he said “wouldn’t be misplaced amongst the RIBA Silver Metal nominations”. The MSA project Robinson at Junction 31: Reveries in non-Place was, he said, “economically set out, simple, and reminiscent of Nat Chard, whose work often deals with the notion of an indeterminate architecture.”

Embroidery

Stacey Brafield was one of four embroidery undergraduates to impress the judges, with her big, stripy, shimmering black panels that wave over walls, turning “space into disco-y-syrup”.

Nicola Searle’s sewn geopolitical maps of Africa and South America were “weird but visionary”.

Sarah Fletcher cast pink masks and pinned 300 or more to a wall in a grid. Each of them has a crack, requiring stitch work to hold together in a work which honours the pioneering facial surgery work that was carried out after the horrors of the 1st World War.

And Steven Clark’s mix of animal, mineral and vegetable on bronze discs, hinted at “a 3D dystopian view of the future”, according to the Blueprint critic.