Canoeing

Canoeing: Timothy Lees

What got you interested in the competition?

Well I entered the competition because a colleague of mine had noticed it and he told me that it was on, I looked it up on the website and thought that I would very much like to have a try. My background is in sculpture anyway so I thought it would be something that would be very interesting to try particularly at the small scale.

Why did you choose Canoeing for your design?

I chose canoeing, really it was design led in fact because I had done a number of designs and I chose my strongest designs and just sort of narrowed it down and canoeing happened to be one of those. I have done a little bit of Sunday afternoon canoeing so I do know very roughly what’s involved; obviously I have not done any competitive canoeing but I thought it was something that I knew a little bit about and so it was something that I would be able to make a decent attempt at designing.

What was the inspiration behind your idea?

I had started off the design just on a purely visual attempt by trying to get dynamic lines which cross and work together and with the lower leaf I was quite interested in trying to make layers which overlapped so that it gave the appearance of depth despite it being a very shallow relief but that was the technical side of it, I think I had really been inspired by seeing some of the previous Olympic courses and seeing the canoes going down the incredible water courses, it looked absolutely amazing, completely dynamic, I wanted to try and capture that energy within the coin.