Winner: Illustration. IKEA Sealight Exhibition.

In March 2013 I spent around 70 hours working on The Price of Oil, an illustrated light for the Ikea Sealight Exhibition at Enmore TAFE. I ended up winning first place in the Illustration category!

• Re-design an existing Ikea light around the theme Submerged Suburbs.
• Take inspiration from your own suburb.
• Only white paper can be used, with a blue spot colour if necessary.
• Include a narrative in your design.

I started working through my process by asking “Why would an Australian suburb be submerged?”. Since we’re a pretty dry country normally I figured it’d have to be because of something unnatural like global warming. I was living in the St Mary’s area at the time, out in Sydney’s western suburbs. There’s not a lot of distinctive landmarks in the area but the Great Western Highway runs right out west to the Blue Mountains and there are heaps of petrol stations along the way.

The idea of a submerged petrol station was a perfect fit for me, meeting the brief and also giving me a chance to work around the ideas of Climate Change, Peak Oil and unsustainable living.

My narrative became a story about a group of people living on top of the flat awning of the local petrol station- the only thing in the area that rises above the water. They cling to an unsustainable way of life by scavenging the packaged foods, left-over LPG bottles and submerged cars from the water below them. To push the point home I called the piece The Price of Oil.

I started working out the ideas in my sketchbook, drawing and writing notes to get my ideas down.

Here I was sketching out the ideas and the layout trying to work out how to tell the story in a cylindrical, tiered way.

The technique I used to create my light was essentially paper silhouetting, using skills I’d learned by cutting stencils for t-shirts. I settled on this approach after lots of sketches and a rough prototype built onto my bedside lamp.

Once I built the prototype I knew I could create a very illustrative cylindrical light with watery focal effects and began working toward the finished product.

I used a Vidja lamp from IKEA, a three tiered, free-standing light with 6 bulbs. I decided to make each tier of the light tell a different part of the story. Each tier would also be made up of 2-3 layers of tracing film and white paper which would allow me to create the sense of depth and underwater atmospheric perspective.

To start working toward the finished light I created three individual illustrations, ink on paper.

The ink drawings served as the template for cutting out the stencils.

The whole process of cutting, gluing layers together and constructing the final light took over 70 hours.

It wasn’t an easy project but it came together pretty well and I was happy with the result. I got a heap of positive responses and of course winning the prize was a great result too. Here are some shots of the finished light.

Divers salvage remains from the petrol station by tying empty jerry cans to an old shopping trolley and floating it to the surface.

From below the waves, one of the diver’s faces is obscured by ripples in the oily surface of the water.

Another diver searches for salvageable scrap around the petrol pumps, her hair billowing around her.

The open hood of a car- the divers have looted it and the shop behind for anything they can use.

Thanks to the IKEA judges that selected my work from the excellent collection of lights made by my fellow students.

Pictures from the exhibition, including all the winners and their lights can be found in this Facebook album from the Sealight Exhibition.
Please leave a comment below and tell me what you think of the work!

LM