RCA Student Takes Top Prize in British Art Medal Society Competition

Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork & Jewellery student Carrie Dickens took the Worshipful Company of Founders Grand First Prize of £750 for her piece, Home/Here. Design Products student Dustin Jessen is the winner of the Tin Plate workers alias Wire Workers prize of £150 for his medal, My Sister and Her Daughter.

The winners were selected from 115 medals by students in the UK, 13 from the University in Sofia, and six from high school. Royal College of Art students across Sculpture, GSM&J and Design Products were among those to take part, supported by foundry manager Irene Gunston, foundry technician Drew Cole, GSM&J technical instructor Peter Musson and Sculpture tutor Denise De Cordova.

The winning RCA entries both offer a personal and contemporary take on the historical and archetypal nature of medals as memento. Dickens’ medal depicts a map, which she describes as a reminder of where home is.

‘Even when it's not possible to go home, it's comforting to know where it is. Carrying this pebble in my pocket I have a printable map of the green parks of London in my pocket. On a sunny day I line up the predominant ray with the hour on the reverse sundial to find my way to a place more like home. I was fortunate enough to hold some of the amazing medals at the British Museums Collection. For a hand-held item, a medal can be a potent package,’ she said.

Jessen, who first worked with the foundry on an AcrossRCA project in 2012, has created contemporary face-on portraits of his sister and niece, embossing and setting these into the medal in a way that prevents the wearing down that happens with conventional medal profiles.

‘My goal was to design a medal that had relevance in a contemporary setting while remaining archetypal. I wanted my medal to communicate my story, describing how I miss my sister and her daughter, who both live in Germany, while I study in London,’ said Jessen.

‘I placed their pictures in exact opposite positions on each side of the medal to make it possible to create a singular blurred picture of their faces when the medal is spun on a surface. The convex parts of old medals are often worn out – I wanted to find a way to secure the image, and so had the idea of raising the area around the portraits. The area around the portraits was not only raised as an aesthetic framing device but also to preserve the object. Last Christmas I gave the medal to my sister as a present, and maybe she will pass it on to her daughter one day,’ he added.

The Student Medal Project, now in its twenty-first year, looks to bring the modern medal into the art college curriculum, whether in sculpture, metalwork or jewellery. According to the British Medal Society, it is an introduction to the art of bronze casting, where students themselves each create 'a small but powerful work of two-sided relief sculpture, which can be held in the hand'. 

This year’s exhibition of the winning medals explores themes ranging from the political to the personal, the abstract to the mainstream, as the students express their creativity and craftsmanship in the surprising medium of the modern art medal.

The British Art Medal Society Student Medal Project runs from 8 March – 19 April at New Ashgate Gallery in Farnham, Surrey.

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