Cameron Pearson wins New Designer of the Year award 2025

Cameron's final-year collection of forged sculptures combine elegant form with geometry, impressing judges and securing the top prize at the 40th edition of New Designers. 

Judges said: “Cameron's forged sculptures are beautiful and elegant. He demonstrates complete mastery of his technique using mathematics and symmetry. Outstanding!”

New Designers showcases the UK’s top creative degree graduates to the public - as well as gallerists, agents and curators from across the creative industries. Exhibiting alongside graduating students from across HCA's design courses, Pearson beat out 2,500 of the UK's top creative graduates to be named the New Designer of the Year.

Growing up in Sutton St Nicholas, Cameron attended St Mary’s RC High School, Lugwardine, and the National School of Blacksmithing before beginning his degree at HCA. 

He has been an active member of the HCA community and participated in the city’s international Ferrous Festival celebrating metal arts. He will now continue developing his craft in HCA’s newly launched MA in Forged Metal Arts—the first of its kind in the UK. 

He will also be exhibiting new original work in Stroud this September as part or Earth, Fire, Iron - made possible by support from the Andrew Bassnet Fund.

New Designers, which this year ran from July 3–6 at London’s Business Design Centre, provides top creative graduates with an incredible platform to launch their careers. The 2025 showcase included graduating HCA students from across its Contemporary Design Crafts, Textile Design, Jewellery Design, and Artist Blacksmithing degrees. 

Their participation was kindly supported by the Herefordshire Community Foundation (HCF) ensuring that financial constraints do not limit talent and ambition and allowing the college to build on recent success at the event following last year’s New Designers’ Stand of the Year award and Joe Shevelan’s 2023 New Designer of the Year Runner Up prize.

Cameron’s award-winning series, Geometry in Perspective, explores the fusion of mathematics and creative expression through forged metal. Inspired by the principles of both Euclidian and Ideal geometry, Pearson begins each sculpture as a 2D composition based on the fundamental rules of lines and shapes. Through precise rotations—90°, 180°, and 270°—these designs are transformed into dynamic 3D forms, each crafted as a single piece of forged steel.

Incorporating the concept of Ideal geometry, his approach draws on human attraction to beauty and perfect form, blending rational structure with intuitive artistry. The sculptures’ clean, deliberate finishes highlight the elegance inherent in their geometric origins.

In the final year of his undergraduate degree, Cameron was also the inaugural recipient of the Peter Rayner bursary awarded to him in-person offered by the Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths.

For more information on HCA's undergraduate and post-graduate degree programmes, you can contact our Outreach team to arrange a campus tour or arrange an informal conversation with academic staff over the summer. Applications are still open for a September 2025 start.