DESIGN IN MOTION Architectural illustration of the V&A Museum of Design, Dundee. Below: ‘Nocturne’ by Geoffrey Mann
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DESIGNS As Dundee celebrates its new status as a UNESCO City of Design, V&A Dundee is celebrating modern Scottish design in all its forms with a brand-new travelling exhibition. David Pollock fi nds out more
F ollowing hot on the heels of the recent announcement that Dundee is to become an ofi cial UNESCO City of Design – a status that places it alongside fellow recipients of the title including Bilbao and Helsinki – a brand-new touring exhibition from V&A Dundee is set to up the ante. Design in Motion supports the public proi le of what will eventually become one of the most important artistic exhibition spaces in Scotland, if not the whole of the United Kingdom. Although recent news reports on the creation of the city’s V&A Museum of Design have focused on budgetary issues – in particular the Scottish Government’s commitment to fund the project by an extra £10m – a poll conducted in late January indicates that the majority of Dundee still appears to be behind the project and what it can do for the city’s regeneration. The Courier, for instance, pointed to the success of the similar and hugely successful Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts in Gateshead.
Judging the new museum’s impact in terms of public engagement, the new V&A seems i rmly pro-active in delivering high-quality exhibitions not just to Dundee, but also to Scotland as a whole. Design in Motion is a collaboration with the Travelling Gallery that will take the work of seven young Scottish designers to locations around Scotland over the next four months, from Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Borders to the Hebridean islands of Lewis, Harris and Skye, ending in a two-day stopover at London’s V&A in late June. ‘V&A Dundee is for everyone in Scotland, and by going on the road we’ll raise awareness of the museum across the country,’ says Sarah Saunders, head of learning and engagement at V&A Dundee. ‘It’s a chance for us to showcase some of our most innovative contemporary
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designers and to introduce design and its benei ts for society to a much wider audience. Our design heritage can be found all over Scotland and across the globe, so we’re also using the tour as a means of i nding out even more about Scottish design – we want to learn from our audiences and encourage people to become more aware of their local design heritage and contemporary designers.’ ‘We also want to inl uence the way design is taught in schools and colleges,’ she continues, ‘and to inspire the next generation of designers, architects and engineers. Raising career aspirations in young people is very important to our mission. Design is business – it’s not a soft option. It’s so important to the Scottish and global economy, and we want to get that message across.’
The artists exhibiting include clothing designer Holly Fulton, artist Geoffrey Mann and jewellery designer Lynne MacLachlan, as well as games designer Sophia George and Glasgow-based 3D architectural modelling centre the Digital Design Studio.
‘Digital technologies allow me to explore and capture the essence of the absolute and work beyond the known properties of our material world,’ says Mann. ‘I’ll be exhibiting a work titled “Nocturne”, originally commissioned for the 2009 Jerwood Contemporary Makers Prize and part of the Long Exposure series, which narrates the erratic behaviour of a moth around a light stimulus, captured through high- speed cinematic technology and forming a delicately poetic hanging sculpture. Though the work may not follow the traditional path of a “maker”, I i rmly believe the hand of the maker is embedded throughout the design process.’ This digital element, says Saunders, is at the heart of Scottish design in the present day. ‘When we looked at the design