The Visual Arts department is a hive of activity this term! We have started the year off with a recycling project where lower school students are creating animals from various recycled objects collected from near and far. Artist, Neil Elliot, has visited classes to give hands on advice for this project. Another local sculptor, Dan Iley, is working with our Visual Art Club every Thursday afternoon and Art Club members have learnt valuable cardboard construction techniques from his extensive experience with the medium. A giant pangolin is being built and this will be on display in early Term 2.

To further consolidate three-dimensional sculptural learning, Year 9s visited Sculptures by the Sea at Cottesloe Beach on 7 March where they viewed and analysed the works of several Australian and International artists.

Year 11 and 12 Visual Arts ATAR students received a day of training in AutoCAD design and laser cutting techniques from Mr Lukas De Klerk in the Technologies department. It is exciting to see the collaboration between Arts and Technologies at the College which fosters the development of progressive contemporary art projects in our school. A recent visit from 'VJzoo', digital media artists in Perth, exposed students to accessible possibilities for their work. The ATAR students also enjoyed being immersed in art at the Art Gallery of Western Australia on Thursday 14 March with some highly informative visual workshops where they were exposed to a number of provocative and dynamic paintings and mixed media artworks, including some contemporary works by Indigenous artists.

We in the department are so thrilled with the new Visual Art room. Our once rather small second room has been extended and we now have a fantastic, spacious room to accommodate the diverse projects that occur in upper school. Finishing touches to the room are being completed and we will be reporting on the new space in the next newsletter, so watch this space!

Liz Gray and Rachael Ramsay

Visual Arts Teachers