Victorious at Febfest Art Exhibition!

The Art Department hosted a very successful 2 day work shop led by the Japanese Artist Shiori Quigley. The students explored a wide array of artistic approaches with the starting point of Japanese Haiku, a form of poetry. The students produced some wonderful poems that displayed a combination of creativity and literary skill. The artist then translated the scripts and taught the students how to write their poems using complex Japanese characters, known as Kanji. The poems were created using a combination of Sumi ink, wax and paint, all applied using a special Fude brush! The artist encouraged the students to explore the characters on a very large scale that resulted in two huge works approximately 10 ft square! On the following day the artist led an origami workshop where the students folded the various decorative papers they had produced. The large scale papers were folded, as a joint exercise, to construct two life size cranes, they were quite spectacular.

Shiori commented throughout the workshops on the independence, energy and creativity displayed by the students. The ability to “pick up” complex techniques was very impressive! Following the workshops the students worked for a full day with myself and Mr Morton of the Music department to produce an animation in which their poems and artworks “came to life”!

The impressive outcome, entitled “Fusion”, was entered for the Febfest Art exhibition and was selected as the winning entry for 2014! This is the first time in 9 years that our school has been awarded this highly competitive prize. In the image above the students can be seen proudly standing in front of their installation! Well done to all who participated this fantastic project!