Year 8 Visual Arts
Year 8 is a mandatory course, where students study Visual Arts for 5 periods a cycle, for one semester then they swap over with Music.
For each of the 2 terms of Visual Arts students explored “Imaginary Worlds” then “Skulls and Bones”
Imaginary Worlds
Our talented year 8 Visual Arts students have endured a very surreal experience throughout their time at high school, this time of uncertainty and has fuelled their artmaking this year as we have explored our unit on Surrealism, followed by a study of Skulls and Bones.
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Our Key artists, Rene Magritte and Redmer Hoekstra, helped us to reimagine our world around us and explore the surreal and unnatural.
Take a look at some of our Surreal bedroom illustrations created during lockdown, inspired by Rene Magritte’s painting “Personal Values” from 1959.
Not only did students explore their immediate surroundings and personal spaces, they also represented the Australian Landscape inspired by Reg Mombassa's work.
Students reimagined the Australian landscape using his iconic, graphic style and included relevant themes and imagery appropriate to our current context.
Here are some examples of our Redmer Hoekstra inspired illustrations, where everyday objects are combined with living creatures.
Students were randomly assigned two options to combine and stretched their imaginations to create unexpected combinations!
Skulls & Bones
When Year 8 arrived back at school, they were eager to get back to practical artmaking and to be able to use the resources and materials we have at school, so it was straight into paint and clay!
Students created mixed media artworks inspired by the influential street style of Basquiat.
Inspired by our key artist, students chose to comment on social justice issues they felt passionate about... from the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change to the Black Lives Matter movement and the refugee crisis. Take a closer look at the examples below to see our student's interpretations.
Another exciting task students worked on involved creating sculptures out of clay. Some groups of students created surreal plant sculptures, inspired by the work of Yayoi Kusama, others formed pop culture skulls inspired by the prolific work of KAWS and others still created Takashi Murakami inspired figurines. We had lots of fun experimenting with this new medium and bringing three dimensional forms to life! Take a look below to see how they turned out!
Additionally, students experimented with distortion to explore a traditional subject, the skull. See below to see how students experimented with colour and techniques to reimagine and warp the familiar shape.
