DISCIPLINES
The purpose of this course is to provide an opportunity for Year 11 students in Visual Arts to enrich and extend their study within a choice of seven specialised disciplines:
Black & White Darkroom Photography
Students use the traditional fine art medium of black and white (silver gelatin) photography to explore photography’s specific visual language and concerns. Using 35mm SLR film cameras, they create negatives from which they print a series of black and white photographs in the darkroom. Students undertake sustained exploration of the fundamental expressive tools of composition, light, tone, subject matter and editing.
Ceramics
Students will explore a specific theme that encompasses the natural environment, working with clay and other raw materials to refine and translate their experiences and observations. Students will investigate and combine a range of ceramics processes to extend and enrich their knowledge and scope of the ceramic studio, as well as the possibilities of clay, glaze and firing, starting from the research and development of ideas through to the presentation of finished artwork for exhibition.
Digital Photography
Students will use the fine art medium of digitally-produced photography to explore specific visual language and concerns. In a sustained exploration of the fundamental expressive tools of composition, light, colour, subject matter and editing, students will examine the manipulative possibilities particular to digitally produced photography and the resulting ideas expressed.
Life Drawing
This course will focus on drawing the human figure and students will spend the entire program drawing from the undraped life model. Through intensive studio practice students will develop their observational drawing skills while studying the inherent structure of the form, proportional relationships and the role of perspective in foreshortening. Different methodologies of depicting form will be employed from quick gestural drawings to sustained exploration of the figure in a spatial context.
Painting
Students who have chosen this discipline will participate in the process of transcription: the analysis and appropriation of an historically significant image by research and practice. Through this process they will interpret the formal qualities and language of an historically significant painting by observation of surface, composition, planar and architectural space as well as cultural and conceptual concerns. In focussing on subjective analysis and research they will be encouraged to develop a personal response to the artistic language of the work with their new perspectives informing the medium.
Printmaking
Students will investigate and combine a range of printmaking processes to extend and enrich their knowledge and scope of the printmaking studio. They will focus on the use of etching in an exploration of contemporary technical, aesthetic and creative concerns. The course will promote independent research and foster the development of individual ideas to produce a folio of prints.
Sculpture
The aim of the course is the development of a set of 3D figurative concepts. In developing their art works within different methods of sculpture all students will undertake a sustained exploration of the human figure. Students will begin with a study in clay and progress to a further study of the human form. The final project entails producing a large scale figure using construction methods. An emphasis is placed on a reinterpretation of sculptural conventions and traditions.
