Eytan Messiah | Head of Visual Arts | Co-ordinator of High School Innovation Team

Future Artefact: Year 11 Visual Arts Exhibition

Future Artefact is an exhibition of prints and ceramics by this year’s Year 11 Visual Arts group. 

The print-based elements of the display come from a unit of work titled Wallpaper. Here students needed to respond to a quote by the science writer Michael Shermer: “Humans are pattern-seeking, story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.” In their response to this prompt, students were restricted to a number of constraints specified within a brief. They needed to generate a repeating pattern in black and white that sought to communicate aspects of their cultural contexts as they understood them. Students were to employ a number of handmade and digital mark-making techniques and their final submission needed to be a vector-based design that was finished with Adobe Illustrator.  

The ceramic pieces in the display resulted from students expanding on their Wallpaper designs, in seeking to synthesise their cultural contexts with their own perceptions of their subjective identities. Once again, students were constrained to a narrow colour palette and limitations around the dimensions of their work. The resulting pieces are sensitive explorations of symbolic devices, both in their surface treatment, as well as their sculptural qualities.    

See the Year 11 gallery page at: www.emanuelschoolvisualarts.com/copy-of-year-11 to see and read about these works in more detail.

Tali Oziel

Joel Ephraim

Sarah Sharwood

Ashlee Orleow