Student Creative: Judith Allen

My time making my project as  MoDiP student creative has sadly come to an end, but It has been such an enjoyable and exciting experience. 

Over the course of my time as a MoDiP Student Creative my project has evolved and developed a lot. 

I was first drawn to the MoDiP Student Creative project due to my background in anthropology and my interest in how the objects we collect tell stories that connect us to our past and to each other. 

My focus for the Student Creative project was wanting to find a way to show the stories behind the objects in the collections and how these objects create us to memory, whilst also using different materials and skill sets to those I normally use within my every day illustrative practise. 

My original idea was to create a plastic shadow box showing both objects within the museum and the stories behind them. 

After realising that this idea might be quite difficult to execute with the time, budget and experience I had, I took some time to experiment with creating a book of illustrated poems, looking at specific objects from each decade from 1920s until present day. 

Whilst this was an exciting way to react with different objects from the museum, after feedback from my tutor I realised I wasn’t experimenting enough with materials and techniques and as a result my MoDiP project work wasn’t as strong as some of the other work I was making for my MA.

I decided to revisit the idea of creating a 3D art piece streamlining my project so I focused solely on one object in the museum - for this I chose the GPO746 telephone from the 1960’s as this was the first object that interested me in the museum. 

I decided to craft a sculpture of the telephone using masking paper and news paper cuttings from the 1960s.

I chose to cover it in paper flowers to illustrate how objects can connect us to our roots. I made my flowers inspired by other floral motifs on other 1960’s objects in the MoDiP collections. 

This project has been a really exciting opportunity to learn different skill sets whilst drawing inspiration from an amazing collection of objects from within the museum.

Judith Allen - MA Illustration