Visual Arts
Year 12 Visual Arts Excursion - Sydney
The HSC Visual Arts class had a full program on our recent visit to Sydney. On Tuesday we began by walking the length of the city viewing site specific public sculptures. This was followed by workshops with artist/educator Sarah Fordham at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Sarah is a lecturer at ACU and has a long connection with SJPC, having been a past artist in residence. Her expertise and generosity with her time was the educational highlight of our trip. At the AGNSW we also visited the ArtExpress exhibition where we saw our own SJPC 2020 student Maya Hallawell’s Body of Work.
In the evening we travelled to the Hall of Industries to experience the immersive “Monet and Friends: Life, Light and Colour”. After learning more about the Impressionists we had many photographs on a recreation of Monet’s Japanese Bridge. We then entered the darkened hall where we were surrounded by projections of the works of the Impressionists, accompanied by quotes and music of the era. We all agreed that it had certainly been worth the trek on a rainy evening to see the work of the Impressionists in this innovative setting.
Wednesday saw the art students visit the other ArtExpress exhibitions at Gymea and Homebush. ArtExpress is an exhibition of Visual Arts students' outstanding bodies of work from the previous year’s HSC. Both exhibitions were inspiring and provoked a great deal of conversation amongst our students, opening up many possibilities for future exploration.
Our next stop was the new Chau Chak Wing Museum at Sydney University where we viewed their collection of antiquities from Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome as well as an outstanding exhibition of indigenous and modernist artworks and artefacts.
We ended the day with a visit to the Chinese Friendship Gardens. The gardens were an oasis of tranquility and beauty within the busy city and mirror the features of traditional Chinese landscape painting on a smaller scale.
Our final art experience was to the White Rabbit Gallery on Thursday. Here we were able to see Chinese Art in its most contemporary form. The exhibition “Lumen” was about light and each time we went up a floor (it had four) we were increasingly amazed at the innovation and immersive art experiences. Finishing our trip here artistically anchored our group firmly in the present and was a fitting way to finish our trip.
We would like to thank the parents who supported us in taking the students on this trip. These experiences are not readily available in regional areas and we hope the students found this beneficial. We would also like to thank Mr Matt Hiddlestone for his organisation and for the many, many hours of hard work and preparation that made this excursion both possible and successful.
