In Term One, Year 7 Visual Arts students have taken a personal approach to their artmaking and art writing. They have explored how identity can be constructed by examining the work of Australian First Nations artist, Gordon Bennett. Students have explored their own identity by drawing self-portraits in graphite, coloured pencil and watercolour. These portraits will become part of larger work they create using drawing, painting and digital technology in the style of Australian artist Brett Whiteley and his artwork ‘Self Portrait in the Studio’ from 1976. The final work will further augment their understanding of self and their ability to visually illustrate these ideas.

In Term One, Year 8 Visual Arts students became aware of how an artist’s culture may inform their artmaking, and how artist’s such as Pablo Picasso use signs and symbols to apprise the audience of their ideas. 

In Term One, Year 9 Visual Arts students explored the natural world with particular reference to the Scottish contemporary artist Andy Goldsworthy. In art writing, students examined the intersection of the natural world and the human condition, both being interdependent and temporal. Their artworks explored ideas of the traces left behind by all living things. Students worked in printmaking, drawing, painting, embossing and ceramics to develop ways of making marks and imprints. 

In Term One, Year 10 Visual Arts students queried the portrayal of the female figure through art history. They observed how the visual representation of women informed the roles they played within various periods of society. Students recognised how the visual and conceptual are intertwined. Reasoning that our visual presentation leads to judgements and shapes attitudes within society. In artmaking, they explored the various impacts these judgements have on ones’ personal experience of the world. 

In Term One, Year 11 Visual Arts students researched postmodernity, and the concept that all understandings are constructed by our experience of the world and our cultural background. Therefore, values and beliefs within society are in a constant state of flux. Students perceived artworks will be understood differently and our dependent on the society and period in which they are viewed. In artmaking, students used non-art materials and repurposed these to create temporal works that explored an issue pertinent to the students’ experience of their world. 

In Term One, Year 12 Visual Arts students continued their progress of their HSC bodies of work. In art writing, they explored the depiction of the reclining female nude in art history. 

 Click here to view our video on what has been happening in Visual Art for Term 1.