Viera Kleinová
The 7th Rings in Water competition was divided into two sections – professionals: visual artists, craftspeople, designers, makers and undergraduate students; and secondary schools students. Slovakia, Hungary, Czech Republic and Poland were invited to participate in the competition. Categories of metal, wood, textile, ceramics and free-style were announced. Panel of judges needed two rounds to select 22 winners. No prize was awarded in ceramics. Competition results were announced publicly in January 2013.
The international panel of judges consisted of two judges from Slovakia – chairman Tibor Uhrín (head of design department at the Arts Faculty of the Faculty of Technology in Košice and Ferdinand Chrenka (head of industrial design studio at the AFAD in Bratislava, Czech Martina Lehmannová (curator for the Prague City Museum and the Jurkovič House in Brno), Hungarian Hedvig Harmati (textile artist and head of dpt. of clothing and textile design at the László Moholy-Nagy Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Budapest) and Polish Grazyna Anna Filipowitz-Mróz (curator and project manager of contemporary design competition Souvenir from Poland). Ferdinand Chrenka believes that it is important that the competition has intellectual potential, the ambition to discover new talents and to discuss about current design issues with popular people. To preserve, improve and archive traditional folk crafts of all types and materials are among main objectives of the ÚĽUV. Yet, employing contemporary technologies is not in contrast with traditional technologies, they add a traditional dimension to design. F. Chrenka understands that it is a success story of our current education system that the Slovak design has satisfactory amount of young and gifted designers. Slovakia has achieved impressive results in terms of traditions, arts and crafts and free-style design. Tibor Uhrín was a participant in first four Rings in Water and has been a jury member from the fifth competition. He believes that the undergraduate students add creative potential to the competition.