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Student's photos highlight plight of Alzheimer’s sufferers

26 June 2008

Lucy Irving, a Digital Media Design student at City College Brighton and Hove, has won an ‘In Book Award’ in the prestigious D&AD Student Awards. Now in their 30th year, the purpose of the awards is to champion the best emerging talent within design, advertising and communications courses around the world and promote it to the creative industries globally. Forty-two different nations have participated in the competition from countries including Finland, Bosnia & Herzegovina, South Africa, Brazil, Honduras, New Zealand, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Italy, China, France, Germany, Spain, Israel, UK and USA. Lucy will how be featured in the D&AD Student Annual which is widely regarded as one of the best ways to kick-start your career within the creative industries. Lucy says:

"At City College, I’ve really refined my research and developed as a designer so it’s nice to get some sort of recognition for the amount of work I’ve been doing. I was just buzzing when I found out that I’d got the award. It’s fantastic to get into a book that will be sent out to so many influential people in the design industry."

Lucy Irving

Lucy Irving

Lucy’s award was for a stunning series of photographs which deal with the emotive issue of Alzheimer’s disease:

"A family member suffers with Alzheimer’s, so my personal experience was a trigger and then I really got into researching the subject via different websites and so on. I wanted to portray it in a different way and not make it all doom and gloom. I think it’s important to show different sides to the subject that people maybe haven’t thought of before. I think I’ve pushed my experiences to one side in order to look at it objectively. I don’t think its good to look at something totally from the inside - you need to get out and look at everything around the subject."

In Lucy’s photographs, she aimed to show objects from the point of view of the person who is suffering from dementia, revealing different aspects and facets of the disease:

"I made some of the objects using different materials, specifically surreal or weird materials, like a teapot out of corrugated cardboard or a cup and saucer made from a cereal box. This was to show the confusion that people with dementia suffer from in relation to everyday objects. I’ve also got images of misplaced objects such as a hat in the fridge and a jumper in the oven. People with dementia often get confused and put objects in the wrong places – the hat in the fridge also has food types around it which actually may clinically prevent the onset of dementia. There’s an image of fruit in a bowl with pins in, which represents a common delusion with dementia sufferers that their food is being poisoned so they end up losing a lot of weight and can be hospitalised. There’s some that are labelled with their names and a picture of two young children which are labelled with names – if you go into a Care Home everything has to be labelled, it helps to label things sometimes like pictures of grandchildren with their names."

"I hope people will look at the images and question what they know about dementia and see it from a different perspective and even maybe want to learn more about it. Alzheimer’s will affect lots of us in the future, so people need to be more aware about it."

For media enquiries, please call Brian Bell, Marketing Communications Officer, on 01273 667788 Ext. 488 or email bb1@ccb.ac.uk

About City College Brighton and Hove: Founded over 100 years ago, City College Brighton and Hove has become an international centre of excellence. Every year over 2,000 full-time and 10,000 part time students as well as many international and European students choose City College as their education provider. The College provides training to over 2,000 businesses and has a ‘City Business Skills’ department which focuses on employers’ needs. Offering over 700 courses from basic level to pre-University level, City College is working with its partners to develop the workforce of the future.