Department Reviews
ART
‘All done with mirrors’ might have been a subtext in the Art Department this year as self-portraiture literally became the genre to measure themselves by as girls worked with the theme ‘Body & Soul’.
The work in the Fauconberg Wing is therefore evidently full of personality. Large scale works dominate the A2 spaces and a welcome variety of responses, extrapolated from generic starting points, enhance the outstanding AS exhibition. It is well worth poring over the GCSE work journals exhibited with other work in F201, many of which are exemplary yet individual.
GCSE girls went with trepidation into the heart of Camarthenshire, to be rewarded with the delights of Glynhir, our discovery of the year. This gently decaying manor house provided us with the raw materials for an unexpectedly luxurious weekend. From the first damp evening, when the first home-cooked three course meal was laid out for us by friendly staff, we soaked up the atmosphere and got down to work. The girls could not believe their luck when we sent them out into the night to find their own cottages, or upstairs in the main house to living-room-size bathrooms and the (surely) friendly ghosts of past artistic weekenders. Hard work was inevitable, of course, as Mr Watt put everyone through their paces with a mixed media exercise too early the next morning. Mono-printing followed, then an extraordinary evening spent walking through a dark wood, following the noise of the waterfall, until ‘Phil the Photographer’ was satisfied that he had found the right spot along the river for a dramatic demonstration of the power of time-lapse photography. Miss Thompson helped the girls to create darkly powerful primal heads from strips of card before Mr Ellis tried to elucidate on the theme with the help of Ann Michaels’ poetry about Marie Curie and Mrs Scott (of the Antartic). Did I mention the food? The salads, from the walled kitchen garden, given colour and taste by the judicious addition of flowers, were indicative of the care with which we were looked after.
Miss Thompson organised a sparkling Prayers after that, in which intrepid UC5 girls stood on stage with lit sparklers to recreate the effect of the time-lapse photographs that they made on the trip.
In October the long wall in GCR was transformed as we tried to engage as many staff and girls as possible in a self-portrait of our community. Phil Harvey, College Photographer was on hand to record the progress of the work photographically to make a permanent record on DVD. The entire north wall of GCR was painted in black stage paint and girls were invited, in year group order, to draw around each other with large white pens. The drawing lasted for a week initially, with each year group allocated particular times to attend. This enabled us to control the ‘look’ of the drawings. Initially LC1s stood upright with hands by their sides (like jelly-babies), then LC2s were invited put their hands up, as if eternally asking questions before LC3s held each others’ hands. Girls in Upper College and the Sixth Form were given more freedom and many staff also participated with enthusiasm. The wall got whiter and whiter until the finale when the PAC Launch was held in the room and our honoured guests responded with alacrity to invitations by white-pen-wielding girls to take part. The piece was complete and a DVD was created. The DVD is the permanent record of the event and, to all intents and purposes, is the work of art. We showed the DVD and slides of the making of the wall to the whole school in Prayers and then invited girls to help us return the wall towards its black state, using black markers. Francis Bacon’s quote, ‘I believe that great art is deeply ordered, even if, within the order, there may be enormous instinctive and accidental things’ seemed to sum up the event. We managed to get people talking about art, drawing and each other. The organisers took risks with the event, as it was impossible to tell what it was going to look like at the beginning so that decisions had to be made about the work as it took place. Girls also learnt about photography as they watched the College Photographer record the stages of the drawing, four photographs at a time, which then had to be assembled digitally as a panorama.
A large group of girls headed for New York in the October half term break and our regular haunts seemed to be especially rewarding, as we crammed in miles of walking in some heat, a sculpture park in Queens, The Sculpture Center, The PS1 Gallery, the Fisher Landau Collection, a crossing of Brooklyn Bridge, Ground Zero and food – all on the first day. The trip was a great success, with each member of the party learning something that benefited their course work from museums like the Guggenheim, the Morgan Library, the Met, the Frick Collection and the Whitney. One of the highlights was our visit to the Talent Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Hard on the heels of the Jackson Five and Ella Fitzgerald, Nicola Armitage, SFC2, danced on stage in front of an enthusiastic crowd. We visited the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and enjoyed looking at (but not drawing, which was forbidden) countless unknown Cezannes, Picassos and many Renoirs.
Gallery trips continue to be a staple of our exam years’ provision and a small group of SFC artists visited London before Christmas to hear Cornelia Parker speak. Girls studying Art at GCSE and A level were fortunate to be given an illustrated talk by Claude Heath in the Art Department in March. Heath is a pioneer of new drawing techniques and a catalogue containing his work, ‘What is Drawing?’ directly inspired the Art department’s postcard campaign in 2004, as well as the sparkler drawings made by UC5 girls mentioned above and the Big Draw mural itself. He talked with passion and clarity about his alternative approaches to drawing, beginning with a riveting account of how he decided to draw (for fully five years) without using his eyes at all. His ‘touch’ drawings are now hugely influential pieces.
GCSE and SFC artists visited London last term to see the Henry Moore statues in Kew Gardens and the ‘From Russia’ exhibition at the Royal Academy to begin the research needed for their external exams this term.
Etching Club, Carving Club, Photography (both digital and film), Life Class and the Art Scholars’ Club have been highlights of a varied and well-supported range of extra-curricular activities.
News
Vicky Tuck – Telegraph Articles
Please see the links below for the latest telegraph articles written by Vicky Tuck. 28 November 2008, 05 December 2008, 12 December 2008, 19 December ...
England’s National Under 16 Hockey Squad for 2009
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Gloucestershire Schools’ Debating Competition
On November 27th Polly Mitchell and Tabitha Ward took part in the Gloucestershire Schools Debating Competition in the Parliament Room in Gloucester Ca...
Drama Productions
The Sixth Form production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play 'The School for Scandal' will be held on 5th and 6th December at 7.30pm in the P...
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