The Journey

The Journey

The Journey

By: Thomas Docherty, 2010
Medium: cast bronze
Size: 87 x 83 x 22mm
Cast by: Lunts Castings
Issue: The Medal, no 57 (Autumn 2010)

Edition: 43

Category:

Thomas Docherty (b. 1981) is a designer and engraver at the UK’s Royal Mint. From 1998 Docherty studied product design at Glasgow Metropolitan College, continuing at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, from 2001 to 2003, during which time he won the Design for Manufacture Award run in conjunction with LINPAC Environmental. At the age of seventeen he participated in a Vitra workshop in France with designer James Irvine and he has exhibited at New Designers in London. Since joining the Royal Mint’s team of engravers in 2005, Docherty has become a fully qualified engraver and has been a finalist in a number of United Kingdom coin design competitions. His winning design for a £2 coin of 2008 commemorating the centenary of the 1908 London Olympics was his first UK coin design, a tremendous achievement for a young designer. In the five years that he has been at the Mint he has worked on projects with themes as varied as religion, sport, royalty and politics, and has included figurative elements and portraiture in his designs as well as architecture, industry and wildlife. About The Journey, now issued by BAMS, the artist writes: ‘The opportunity to create this medal came after a year-long experience I had travelling. I knew I wanted to design the medal around something that I felt strongly about, and it made sense to base it on these travels, which have been such an influential part of my life to date. This medal has been designed as a tactile sculpture that tells the story of my journey throughout that year. Every element of the design is intrinsic to the medal’s meaning and nothing has been included for reasons of form or beauty. ‘Both faces of the medal are a maze; this represents the journey in that every maze has a beginning and an end, or a start and a finish. I found the concept of mazes an appropriate metaphor, because to get from the beginning to the end a person has to first embark on a journey, which, like mine, involves decisions – some of them right, some of them wrong – but all contributing factors which essentially shape the journey. The maze, however, is unlike any other. This is because it was developed and constructed within a close-up image of the centre of my thumb print. I chose to do this because the journey was such a personal experience that I literally put my print on. I achieved this by experiencing and adapting to different cultures and people, and by making the aforementioned decisions, which defined the whole experience. Finally, the side profile of the medal consists of a 360-degree panorama of contour lines carved from the different layers of the thumb print, to imitate those commonly found on a map. These contour lines represent the land, both high and low, crossed while undertaking the journey.’