Visual Arts

The visual arts program is exploring installation art, beginning with an underlying focus on place-noticing and experimental & observational drawing. Students have been invited to slow down, notice and pay attention to their relations with place and multi-species. We are grateful to be learning from local Aboriginal knowledges, and place-noticing project; Out & About with the Kulin Seasons (Sax, Serra & Hamm, 2020).

Biderap Season

Neighbourhoods have been united in making and installing a flight of hand-folded and painted origami butterflies. The art room has been transformed with 100s of butterflies resting on the ceiling, walls, windows, and doors, all in sculptural formation and in the direction of escaping outdoor. Our lively and welcoming installation ‘Biderap Butterflies’ is paying attention to our often overlooked co-city dwellers and shining a warm glow on Kulin season Biderap and our shared atmosphere.

Experimental & Observational Drawing

We have been taking art outside, and through experimental drawing exercises explored different ways to look and record what is seen and felt. Alongside experimenting with mark-making, the drawing activities have encouraged students to be observant and to notice things that often might go unseen, and to create artworks that express the experience of being with place at a specific time.

Still life

Drawing as a Way of Being in the Here & Now, Tiny Things, Place

Walking Drawings

Students experimented with drawing while walking, creating artworks that captured their sensory and visual experiences as they move through spaces. Students explored layering marks to record the movement of their bodies and the constant scanning of their vision between both broad and narrow focus on all that they encounter as they walk. The activity encouraged students to appreciate and be present and attuned to the environment and create artworks that express how they view spaces around them and how it feels for them at a particular time and place.

Express what you see…AND feel

Iuk (Eel) Season : Drawing Over Maps

Students’ drawings over maps explore Eastern Kulin Seasonal calendar – Iuk season and acknowledge the deep and continuous connection between Wurundjeri people and the lands and waterways that they have been custodians of for generations. Their drawings work in competition with the map and highlight the migratory paths of eels which travel along ancient underground streams and sewers beneath Naarm (Melbourne).