5th Year at Tate Britain to see Rachel Whiteread

5th Year Artists visited Tate Britain to see one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists, Rachel Whiteread, who uses industrial materials such as plaster, concrete, resin, rubber and metal to cast everyday objects and architectural space. Her evocative sculptures range from the intimate to the monumental.

Born in London in 1963, Whiteread was the first woman to win the Turner Prize in 1993. The same year she made House 1993–1994, a life-sized cast of the interior of a condemned terraced house in London’s East End, which existed for a few months before it was controversially demolished.

U4 Art Textiles students at The Museum of Natural History, London.

Students spent a research day in The Natural History Museum taking inspiration from the collections there to inform this years theme 'Inside Out'. The aim of the project is to focus on the human body from the inside and students were given the opportunity to do so while examining The Spirit Collection, where numerous organic forms have been preserved in liquid and kept in glass jars. Some of the specimens date back to 1800’s and were collected by Darwin himself. 

Students also learned how hormones affect the body, how senses influence perception, how the memory functions and how the brain and other organs work together. Studies the students made in their sketchbook are the basis for their research, which will be developed over the course of the year into a wearable garment. Watch this space!

A Level Fashion Photoshoot

A Level Fashion students had fun at the end of term photographing their final designs in the photography studio. The students modeled and styled the shoot themselves and enjoyed experimenting with shutter speeds and long exposures to create some edgy effects with the camera.

Images below include the work of Olivia Howe, Abi Broniman and Holly Dunmore.

Summer Exhibition Invitation

Architecture Against the Grain U6 Workshop

Eight prospective U6 architects took part in a day long workshop run by Juliet Haysom who is a teacher at the prestigious Architectural Association School. 

The day centered around a series of Advertisements for Architecture by the influential international architect Bernard Tschumi  one of which read: 'To really appreciate architecture, you may even need to commit a murder'. 

Taking this provocation as a starting point, this workshop invited the U6 architecture students to reconsider the familiar surroundings of the school in as a site for such an extreme action, and to produce measured sketches and notation diagrams that described their devised event. 

By inviting students to read the buildings and grounds 'against the grain', the intention was to reveal the hidden aspects of the site's design and shed light on the close relationship between buildings and the ways in which they are inhabited."

The Art department took all the Upper and Lower 6th form Photography students to the Tate Modern and the Photographer’s Gallery to see the ‘Modernist Eye’; an exhibition of seminal photographic works from the 1920’s to the 1950’s which now form part of Elton John’s personal collection. We also encouraged the girls to study other photographic works in the Tate, which currently includes a number of rooms exploring ‘Art and Society’ This has works by the Bechers and Thomas Struth, all of which will further their research and development of their A level Coursework Portfolios.

At the same time in the Photographer’s Gallery we saw an exhibition of Feminist Avant–Garde of the 1970s, an expansive exhibition comprising forty-eight international female artists and over 150 major works from the VERBUND COLLECTION in Vienna. Focusing on photographs, collage works, performances, films and videos produced throughout the 1970s, the exhibition reflected a moment during which practices of emancipation, gender equality and civil rights protest movements became part of public discourse.

David Hockney at The Tate

L5 GCSE artists visited the sell out David Hockey exhibition at The Tate Britain and enjoyed seeing the lifetime achievements of one of Britain's most important living artists. From photomontage to iPad painting, they wondered at Hockney's range.