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It’s been a busy start to the term in the Visual Arts with the Perth Festival bringing some blockbuster exhibitions to town. Our Visual Art students have been busily engaging with our art spaces and galleries, artists and their amazing work.

Our Year 9/10 Visual Arts students enjoyed a day out of the College visiting our major gallery spaces in and around Perth. First stop was a quick visit to Boola Bardip to view Spinifex People: Art and stories from Pila Nguru. This profound exhibition allows the viewer to explore the lives and traditions of the Spinifex community, deeply connected to their ancestral land in the Great Victoria Desert. This is a free exhibition, and I encourage and recommend a visit to this amazing exhibition.

Walking the short distance to the Art Gallery of WA, students explored Form and Feeling; Artists’ studies of the 20^th century. This exhibition brings together significant figurative oil paintings and their preparatory drawings – a number of which have never been shown before. Form and feeling is focused upon technique and process, exploring the differing approaches to line, shape, contour and materiality as these artists progress preliminary sketches into finished works.

Students completed a visual analysis workshop in the exhibition Balancing Act. This exhibition features Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander works of art from the State Art Collection. Indigenous artists explore a vast range of material revealing the wide scope of First Nations truth-telling and art-making practice. Radical observations about the ups and downs of life are placed side by side with expressions of relationships with Custodial Country; the locations and places artists and communities care for, according to their kin and family ties with place.

Our students then completed an art and mindfulness workshop in the gallery’s Activation space. These participatory experiences encourage slow-learning pedagogies which are deeply embedded in projects that support meaningful engagement, arts learning, advocacy, and wellbeing outcomes.

Back on the bus again, and onto the Fremantle Arts Centre to view another series of Perth Festival exhibitions. Kate Mitchell’s Idea Induction is a series of works responding to the question: Where do ideas come from? Physically and energetically, ideas arise from the alpha and theta brainwave states—spaces of relaxation and heightened creativity. Next was Ballardong artist Dianne Jones’ exhibition The Beach. Jones uses analogue processes to insert herself into Australian art history and by doing this, subverting the white national imaginary. Lastly, Gooniyandi artist Mervyn Street’s exhibition – Stolen Wages. This exhibition features newly commissioned paintings that continue Mervyn’s legacy of telling truth to power, following his historic court victory over the State Government for decades of wages stolen from the cattlemen of the Kimberley.

To round off the day, students participated in a drawing workshop in the beautiful grounds of the Fremantle Arts Centre.

It was an awesome, big day out!

Written by Louise Elscot - Arts Teacher