St Hilda’s School
Course overview – Journeying the Labyrinth
Rationale: Labyrinths have always been associated with ancient rituals of self-discovery. Spiraling inward and out, their serpentine flow is the most generative form of subtle energy. The process of moving through the pathway unwinds this stored energy, releasing, magnifying, and ultimately harnessing the flow.Moving through a Labyrinth changes ordinary ways of perception connecting the inner and the outer, the right brain and the left brain, the involutional and the evolutional. At its most basic level the labyrinth is a metaphor for the journey to the center of your deepest self and back out into the world with a broadened understanding of who you are.
Semester 1 / Semester 2 / Semester 3 / Semester 4Diversification / Specialisation
Perceiving Images /Objects / Conceiving Images/Objects / Generating Images/Objects
Unit Title / 1. Personal Signatures / 2. Zeitgeist / 3. Hybrids & Archetypes
This unit may be taken with an artist in residence / 4. The Self Portrait Lucid Dreaming: Transformation and Transcendence / 5. Alchemy: Art as Process
This unit may be taken with an artist in residence / 6. Emerging from the Labyrinth
Concept / Making Marks
From mimetic to automatist approaches
the idea that art is a personal signature is explored through an examination of markmaking in its diversity of materials and historical contexts / The Spirit of the Times
An exploration of Popular Culture and its relationship to art from the Synthetic Cubists through to Post Modernist approaches including post object art. Students will explore representations in the media and advertising with special emphasis on the portrayal of the female.
Students will explore a variety of media, including collage assemblage, and/or digital imaging and photography. / Subverting the Status Quo
Students will further explore concepts such as those covered in the unit Zeitgeist with an emphasis on three-dimensional assemblage and installation approaches.
This unit will look at the idea of making meaning from found materials and objects with particular emphasis on the idea of subversion.
Students will be encouraged to recognise archetypal images in their own and others work and to subvert these images to add meaning. / Sense and Self: Externalising the Internal
An exploration of self – Rembrandt via Bill Viola and new media.
Students will explore a variety of media including digital manipulation, photography, video, painting, mixed media, photocopies etc / Alchemy involves the process of refining basic elements. In this unit students are asked to focus on the process of artmaking by beginning with raw, elemental ingredients: a range of symbolsand marks, transforming these through a process of composition development in order to communicate a sense of their own personal inner landscape.
Students may draw upon visual symbolism, psychological / dream symbolism, mandalas psychoanalytical theory, visualisation activities, active imagination processes, philosophical and/or related theoretical sources to arrive at a range of symbols before weaving these into a artwork that communicates aspects of their own philosophy. They will form and resolve individualised artwork(s). / Art as Process/Art as Reflective Awareness.
Students will explore various approaches to markmaking through an initial intensive series of exercises designed to broaden their idea of drawing. Concepts of Spirituality in Art will be explored through contemporary and historical contexts. They will examine the concept by developing their own personal signature of markmaking and an understanding of that of other artists in the vein of Abstract Expressionist approaches before resolving individualised artwork(s). Existentialist Theories, Abstract Expressionsist
Approaches, links between Abstraction and Spirituality in artmaking
Focus / Mark making
through :
- observational drawing, still life, life drawing, appraising the work of other artists students will explore those elements which make up a personal signature; use of visual language, techniques, media, concept and subject matter
- texture
- line
- layers
- form
- shapes
- time
- composition
What makes artworks and artists unique or otherwise / Appropriation Subversion and the media.
Feminist artmaking
The body
Collage and/or Digital Media Movie posters, advertisements, film and video genres, subversive websites and ezines,
This is teacher directed with the opportunity for students to develop their own individual areas of interest within the framework given. / Assemblage and Installation
Making meaning from found objects
Students will look at how materials have influenced artmaking in the 20th century
They will use both 2- and 3-D media to make meaning from found materials
Possible outcomes: Jungian Archetypal Dolls, Installation and Virtual Objects
Barbie as Archetype, the mad/bad goddess, or Jungian Dolls are possible approaches to the concept. / The Self Portrait rebuilding / reforming a sense of self out of a re-evaluation of one’s lived and learned experiences.
This focus will be used as a basis for students working through a series of self-reflective questions and exercises of self-portraiture in its broadest sense, leading to a series of digital images, assemblage work, performance, projection, video, or installation.
Appraising tasks will involve an exhibition catalogue and an essay exploring similar themes. / Archetypal Thinking
After an initial intensive experimental process in selected media students will develop artworks by exploring ways in which individual artists use visual language, selected media approaches and techniques to express self motivated concepts. Students will be encouraged to explore aspects of the Unconscious / Subconscious through images and symbols as per Jungian Archetypes.
Student directed focuses will be developed with in the conceptual framework provided. / Markmaking
Student directed focuses with in this.
Media Area Response / Markmaking and drawing in all its diversity
Using Conventional and Unconventional media
Making marks on the environment
Experimental folio and visual diary work.
Appraisal task and oral presentation. / Found materials
Collage
Text
Photocopy
Conventional and unconventional materials
Experimental and developmental folio and visual diary work / Found materials/objects
Students will be involved in an excursion to opportunity shops around the Southport area to find interesting ‘junk’ from which they will make meaning by manipulating, adding to, painting, collaging etc.
Experimental and developmental work in the visual diary leading to a three-dimensional object assemblage or installation project / Digital Media: Photoshop, Video, Performance alone or in combination with a selection from those areas previously explored either in appraising or making tasks
Experimental Folio of self reflective questions and answers
Series of works using a variety of media based on self portraiture
A series (minimum 5 images) of digitally manipulated portraits
Visual diary research and development
and
Exhibition catalogue related to portrait series theme
One essay / Any
Student selected media area / Any
Student selected media area
Relevant Artists / Durer, Rembrandt,
Krasner, Pollock,
Motherwell,
Basher Baraki / Picasso,
David Salle,
Sally Smart,
Barbara Kruger,
Jenny Holzer
Kurt Schwitters,
Germaine Greer,
Guerrilla Girls,
Lucy Lippard,
Orlan,
Cindy Sherman
Adbusters
Lacan site:
interesting site for considering the ?
What is Art? / Louise Bourgeois
Meret Oppenheim
Judy Chicago
Joseph Cornell
Damien Hirst
Eva Hesse
Patricia Piccinini
Mona Ryder
Donna Marcus
Yoko Ono
Sherrie Levine
Kiki Smith
anon Venus de Willendorf
/ Bill Viola
Marian Drew
Laurie Anderson
Yasamasa Morimura,
Judy Chicago
Cindy Sherman,
Jana Sterbak,
Basher Baraki
Marlene Dumas,
Orlan,
Frida Kahlo,
Joy Hester
Stellac
Jenny Saville
Robyn Stacey
Phillip George / Bill Viola
Louise Bourgeois
Judy Chicago
Julie Rrap Brown
Sally Smart
Arthur Boyd
Jill Orr
John Wolseley and *
Egyptian
Lin Onus
Joan Miro
Bronwyn Oliver
Michael Nelson Tjakammara
Pablo Picasso
Basher Baraki
Damien Hirst
Tim Johnson
Reg Mombassa / Mambo Graphics
Chant Avedissian
Others from student research
Ancient Indian painters
Resources:
Alchemy, is the Great Work that perfects chaotic matter, whether it be expressed as the metals, the cosmos, or the substance of our souls / Andy Goldsworthy and *
and *
Mike Parr
See this site for many of the following
Anselm Kiefer
Jan Senberg
Jackson Pollock
Lee Krazner
Cave of Lascaux
Jenny Watson
Robert Motherwell
Arthur Boyd
Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Angela Brennan
Jean Claude and Christo
Jennifer Turpin
Vassily Kandinsky
Georgia O’Keefe
Franz Kline
Egon Schiele
Jim Dine
Kathe Kollwitz
Nancy Azara
Rothko
Native American
Surrealist Automatist artists
Others from student research
Formative Folios / Verification Folios are Selected from These Units