Studio Arts

Senior Art / Studio Arts 2021

Students studying the semester length subject of Year 10 Art and those in VCE Studio Arts have both experienced a combination of on-site learning and remote learning.

While they will tell you their preference is of course to be in the classroom, VCE students were equipped with goodie bags of materials where possible, to continue specific projects while at home.

An absolute student favourite - Year 10s completed their hero and villains Pop Art inspired paintings while learning on-site in Semester 2 after a long awaited break between practical classes. They were able to complete a graphite pencil portrait of a chosen notable person during remote learning in addition to strengthening their understanding of the key arts language used in responding to artworks from a range of cultural and historical contexts.

VCE Studio Arts students have transformed themselves into emerging young artists, making steady progress on their final art pieces this semester, documenting this studio process along the way and sharing their progress with peers in weekly WebEx classes.

Following the Studio Process of 'Explore, Develop, Refine, Resolve, Present' students in Year 12 have produced two independent final artworks that communicate ideas and meaning as relevant to their own personal theme and conceptual possibilities.

I concentrated my ideas in unit 4 by focusing greatly on the visual and material interpretations of nature, expressing it through both 2D and 3D forms using the themes of mother nature and pollution, which was influenced by my potential directions 2 and 3.

I began exploring a visualization of nature using the subject matter, Mother Nature. My original idea was to sculpt a replica of my hands that would represent Mother Nature herself and represent this in a nurturing position as if they are embracing the world in which we all live in.

When it came to the theme of Pollution, my original idea was to create a large A1 sized painting that somehow incorporated the theme of Mother Nature, so I chose to highlight mother nature by sketching her hand in the centre which would be reaching out of a pile of oil, soot and other things that are known for polluting the earth.

Creating this artwork, I wanted my audience to feel the complete opposite to my first artwork sculpture. I wanted the audience to feel a sense of guilt or realization as to what they are doing to the earth by adding a slogan “The more plastic we put into the ocean, The more Mother Nature suffers.” The aesthetic quality of my first artwork represents the embracive, nurturing, literal mother-like bond between herself and the planet and expresses to the audience that the purity of nature is underappreciated.

The relationship that is joined between both artworks is the theme of Mother Nature and the natural beauty she enforces that can be taken away, as seen in my pollution artwork. My main idea was to have both artworks connected to each other in a way using the feature of the hand. I chose the hand as the main “storyteller” because the hand can and does express that different aesthetic that I was after.

The focus of my work in unit 3 was the development and exploration of my theme, “Geometry”, focusing on the emphasis of its presence in different circumstances, and how it shapes the world around us and the way we perceive it. This theme was largely inspired by my liking for very intricate and detailed works of art, combined with my love for math that I have had since I was a child led me to want to create something that demonstrated both of these things while also implementing my own artistic styles of simplistic, very shape and pattern focused art.

I refined my ideas in unit 4 by focusing more specifically on exploring how we see geometry, and emphasising it in a more everyday situation, as well as a geometric optical illusion, meant to demonstrate how much geometry and shape can affect our perception of our world. Through the creation of these two pieces, I want to create artworks that draw in the observer, with the scene and pattern that the viewer can almost imagine continuing on forever. I aim to create very distinct contrast in my second artwork in order to build on and emphasise the confusing and intriguing nature of patterns and optical illusions.

My final pieces both utilise very clean and simplistic aesthetics, with both of them having a focus on specific colours, grey for my first one, and black and white for my second, these aspects help to effectively communicate my distinct focus on geometry, and the want for the geometrical shapes and patterns to be the focus in each piece. I believe that my final artworks are a sound realisation of my ideas that has been effectively refined from my original potential directions. My focus on the way we perceive things and the ways in which shape and line can effect this was communicated through the subject matter in each artwork and complimented by the materials that allowed me to create very clean lines and shapes in both my pieces.