Mixing 250 pizza boxes with a field of cows

What do 250 pizza boxes and a field of cows have in common? Both are featured in a final-year project by University of Teesside graduate Dan Rad.

Dan, 22, from Lancaster, has just achieved a BA (Hons) degree in Graphic Design at the Middlesbrough-based University. For his final year project, he contrasted the differences between two worlds, the external rural and the internal urban.

He captured rural life in the form of a five-minute film, simply displaying the effects of the foot and mouth outbreak on farming communities. For the urban, he constructed a model made out of 250 pizza boxes, spelling the word junk. He received 200 boxes from his father Mosten’s pizza business, and found the remainder himself.

Dan said: “I wanted a big contrast between two environments. I chose the rural as I grew up in the country, all my friends are farmers. I made the film in a friend’s farm in Thirsk, North Yorkshire over 12 hours. I’ve shown in a simple way how farming communities were devastated by the effects of foot and mouth. Some of my fellow students who saw it were quite shocked.

“For the urban, I chose the 250 pizza boxes as I read a statistic on a news web site that some people have 250 take aways a year. When there are only 365 days in a year that’s quite remarkable. I’ve nothing against pizzas, I eat them. It’s one thing to buy a pizza; it’s another to buy one with chips on top. It’s the type of junk food I’m concerned about. I first started to think about this when I saw the Channel 4 programme, You are what you eat, where a person’s weekly food choices are stacked up on a table.”

Dan has now gained a place on a two-year Master of Arts course in Curating, based in Devon. Eventually he wants to set up his own exhibitions company.

Dan added: “I chose Teesside because it has a good reputation for graphic design. I enjoyed the course; it was intensive but quite enlightening.”

Dan is a former student of Queen Elizabeth School in Kirkby Lonsdale and Lancaster and Morecombe College. He is the son of Mosten Rad and Diane Lord.

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