All our lives are touched by the visual arts, and if prehistoric art offers any insights into the human condition, it is the enduring centrality of art in understanding and appreciating the world around us and our place in it. Through art, we assert our creativity, develop and hone technical skills, and express ourselves by sharing our stories and worldview. Art plays a critical role in helping children develop their motor skills, and, through art, they too make sense of their surroundings and stamp authority on their experiences.

I teach because I profoundly believe in the education of art and I enjoy working with young people, who never fail to impress me with their abilities to think laterally and to create intuitively.

As an art educator, I am acutely aware of the potential magnitude of my role in shaping my students’ formative experiences as artists and creatives. I wish to be a positive influence for my students, which is why I am dedicated to ensuring that each student has frequent and multiple entry points for enjoying the art-making process. One of my overarching goals is for students to be at ease with taking creative risks and making mistakes so that they can more skillfully manipulate materials and more fully express their creative voices. I do my best to serve as an inspirational springboard for my students, and I take great pride in them and their work.

Year 3 Canopic Jars

Students learned about the ideas, symbols, and conventions of ancient Egyptian art, and more specifically, canopic jars– vessels for storing and protecting the organs of deceased pharaohs in the afterlife. They practiced communicating value and form in colour pencil studies, and they developed skills in ceramics by creating a canopic jar in clay.

Year 5 Fish

Students used a range of different mediums and techniques to produce imaginative, highly patterned images of tropical and exotic fish. They conducted oil pastel studies, where they experimented with subtractive techniques; they made mixed media collages using newspaper, paint, and chalk pastels; and they also worked with printmaking techniques to produce colourful polyblock prints.

Year 6 Victorian Teapots

Coinciding with their history lessons on Victorian Britain, students discussed the origins of British tea culture and examined the varied designs of Victorian tea sets. Students practiced communicating value, shape, and form in observational charcoal drawings, and they later practiced colour mixing in their paintings.

Year 11 Portraiture

Students explored the visual and conceptual elements of portraiture through life drawing, painting, printmaking, and collage. They also built on studies in human anatomy to consider wider issues of culture, identity, and diversity.

Art historical and contemporary references were discussed, including Baroque, Fauvist, and Cubist approaches to portraiture, as well as the work of Cindy Sherman and Kerry James Marshall. The term culminated in a self-directed final project in which students chose one of four themes to generate a creative and personal response to the genre.

The A-Level Art & Design programme offers a flexible but demanding 2-year course for aspiring artists, designers, and prospective university students to assemble a portfolio of completed artworks. In this time, students are challenged to hone technical skills, build critical and conceptual awareness, and improve the clarity by which they communicate their creative voices.

They are expected to engage in independent, thoughtful, and comprehensive research; rigorously investigate medium, content and function, the work of contemporaries and artists of the past, and realise their personal artistic objectives.

Textiles ECA

Working just under an hour each week, middle school students spent the Autumn 2019 semester making Matisse-inspired collages and applying textile fundamentals to design and produce textile cushions. Like Matisse, they used scissors rather than a paintbrush to construct abstract and colourful decorative images with cut paper. Using their collages as full-scale references, they began cutting felt for their cushions, adhered the pieces using Bondaweb, learned how to sew buttons, and stitched the panels of their cushions together with a running stitch.

Art ECA

For Art ECA during the Autumn 2018 semester, middle school students looked at the work of Yinka Shonibare, who uses wax print heavily in his work, drawing on their popularity as “authentically African” fabrics. Each middle school student worked on a disc, painting designs seen in waxprint fabrics, then embellished with odds and ends such as corks, bottle tops, felt tip marker caps, and popsicle sticks. They then worked together painting the background to mobilise their discs in a kaleidoscopic arrangement of lines, shapes and patterns, titled Roman Candles.

A weekly after-school ceramics club was held for earthenware enthusiasts Year 7 and up. It was open and accessible to students at every skill level, including those who had never worked with ceramics before.

The club provided students with an opportunity to learn, practice, and perfect their skills in hand-building, sculpture, decoration, and firing. Open-ended project briefs were set and more experienced students were encouraged to pursue their own projects.

In my work as a textile artist, I playfully borrow elements from wallpaper and fabric design to create indulgent and grandiose collages. Seeking to manipulate and deconstruct pattern in innovative and colourful ways, I bring together upholstery fabric swatches with pre-existing and original patterns and design motifs ranging from the floral to the animalic.

Various combinations and sequences of beads, buttons, and sequins frame a familiar porthole– a window into the image. White pearls and gold buttons lend an air of opulence, whilst zippers and office clips bring a taste of the mundane; creating a tension between the sumptuous and stately with the gaudy and incongruous– between what is tasteful and what is distasteful. Patterns meet with one another in a dazzling, prismatic dialogue.