Eytab Messiah – Head of Visual Art

The role of exhibition in student learning

The exhibition of an artist’s creative work is an integral stage in the ‘lifecycle’ of any artwork. This invites an audience to engage in the creative process and arguably plays a fundamental role in the enrichment of a thriving culture.

Through exhibiting our students’ artworks, we are invariably recognising and celebrating the various creative processes that have led to their final work. However, an exhibition also serves another purpose in education; it makes students’ thinking visible. It is a powerful tool in enabling our students’ capacity to develop:

– a deeper understanding of content

– a greater motivation for learning, and

– their alertness to opportunities for thinking and learning.

Read more about these skills at Visible Thinking by Project Zero www.pz.harvard.edu/projects/visible-thinking

To round off a year of artmaking and a series of exhibitions, the Visual Arts Department will be presenting Spotlight, an exhibition that brings together a small selection of artworks from Years 1-10. Works range from explorations of abstraction in acrylics and oil paints, cubist wooden sculptures, etchings of mythical beasts, still life paintings in watercolour and photographic studies of the biblical tale of ‘Judith and Holofernes’.    

This exhibition will be on display in the Angles Leadership and Learning Centre from Wednesday 29^th November and closes on Wednesday 6^th December.

Our online gallery hub www.emanuelschoolvisualarts.com also serves to catalogue and showcase artworks made by Emanuel School students in a curated online space. This enables a more diverse audience to access a much broader array of student work from Year 1 all the way up to our HSC works in a dynamic digital gallery context. Here you can view and read about student work, download catalogues and subscribe to our blog.

Still Life

Abstract Art

Oil Painting

Etching