Art education at Level 2

Creativity and students immersing themselves in an art experience are extremely important to the DPAG LEOTC team. The current Covid levels have meant John and Libbi, our amazing educators have had to adapt how schools visit and interact with our collection – and it certainly isn’t ‘business as usual’ here at the moment!
 
In level 2, instead of a whole class visiting, only nine to ten children visit and act as art ambassadors for their school. Our first school visit was Thursday which coincidentally happened to be Libbi’s first day teaching in the DPAG classroom.
 
During the visit the students observed and responded to artworks in the gallery, talked about the emotions they felt with certain pieces, and looked at different painting techniques.
 
The active and creative sides of the workshop included creating a sculpture city and challenging themselves to create a living portrait, based on the works of Nina Katchadourian, using only paper towels. When back in the classroom, they painted a background using calm brush strokes on one side and angry brush strokes on the other. The students then chose the colours they thought represented each style of painting and drew a skull in black and white pastel.  The skull needed to portray an emotion so there was a lot of discussion about how to do that when there is no skin or muscles to rely on. This was a real challenge of their skills.
 
Libbi says of the experience–
I loved every moment of my first workshop. I really get a kick out of guiding students to create something amazing and seeing how proud they are of what they have achieved. There is nothing better than being told, “I like that you didn’t make us all do the exactly the same thing, you gave us the idea and let me run with it.”
 
Noho ora mai, Rachel Cooper
DPAG Audience Development Manager