Art Forms of Fiction

During a quiet month, I entered a fun Barbican competition - to design a poster for their 'Into the Unknown' exhibition. I had a few false starts on this one, but luckily the work paid off and I won the competition. 

Basically, I wanted to create a series of sci-fi experiments. Originally I was going to have everything in petri dishes - mimicking planets... and each dish/planet was to be based on a theme from sci-fi outputs (movies/comics etc.) It came across a bit meh - so I redesigned it to what it is now, hero-ing some of the experiments.

It was accompanied by a rationale, limited to 50 words, so here's what I said: ‘I've taken inspiration from Ernst Haeckel's 'Art Forms of Nature', creating a specimen sheet of sci-fi related themes: i: 'Host' ii: 'Rock' iii: 'Flora' iv: 'Intelligence' v: 'Mother' vi: 'Bubblegum' vii: 'Slime' viii: 'mutation' ix: 'A.I.' x: 'Sea life' xi: 'light/reflection' xii: 'Alien life' xiii: 'sound'. In several cases the specimens draw influence from specific movies/books.’

http://blog.barbican.org.uk/20...

Judge's Comment: ‘This is a really exciting response to the brief. It probes our visions of the future with exciting imaginations of organic lifeforms and oozes fun. When I first saw this print I was struck by its visual power and when I started reading about the concept behind it I was all the more impressed. This entry was the most well rounded and accomplished, a truly inventive take on the theme.’