The Year 8’s took a trip to Sydney to the Art Gallery of NSW. The aim of the trip was to look at different art making practices: sculpture, ceramics, metal, graphics, textiles and more to give them an idea that not all artists are amazingly talented with the brush or pen, but that art is an expression of creativity that we can find in the world around us.
We spent time looking at the contemporary gallery where art is made from all sorts of materials. Some art is readily understood and other artworks could be shocking, weird or simply didn’t make much sense. The students were free to roam around and try and find as many different ways to make art as they could.
We also took a walk down to the Opera House, which was a first for some students, followed by a long walk through the Botanic Gardens, where there is a current exhibition called “Artists in the Gardens”. They enjoyed looking at the work of local artists and were fairly amazed at some of the prices – and that they were mostly sold! They even got to meet a few artists who talked about how they made their artworks.
The day was made all the better for the sunshine and never-ending questions about art. I hope I’ll be able to get down there later in the term with Year 7 too. Art isn’t always easy to understand, nor is it always accessible or affordable … but it is something that you can enjoy at any age – without uttering “but I’m not good at drawing”. That really was the point – to make art making accessible, to show students that it can be made of almost anything! In particular, the students liked the ‘assemblage‘ artworks of a local artist from Long Jetty.
I asked them to take lots of photos … so if your child is in Year 8 ask them and talk about what they saw! If you want to follow their adventures this term you can . Stage 4 is at UNIVERSITY in Virginia … through their course DS106.
This course began at the University of Mary Washington in Spring of 2010 when Jim Groom re-imagined the way the Computer Science Course in Digital Storytelling, CPSC 106, might be taught. Since Jim Groom blogged about ds106 as an open and online experiment on December 7, 2010, this site has aggregated and archived 62877 blog posts created by its participants.
The work they do is all posted online at our course site which you can visit here. You can also see their work via the US site by visiting this page. We’re making history, from art … learning to blog, learning to create things we never knew we could … because there’s more to art that memes on Facebook and selfies on Instagram . This is a digital story of our day in the city and part of the DS106 experience.
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