Our current exhibition at St. Julian's Palacio

I wish to share with you a few pages from our school magazine with examples of work from year 6 to year 9, which are now on display in our gallery in the Palacio. These pages were published on the Lighthouse magazine two weeks ago.

Francisco Zhan

Francisco completed his IB at St. Julian's in 2012. He was a brilliant Art student and went to study a Foundation year in Art and Design at Falmouth. He is now studying at Goldsmiths in London.
Francisco wrote to the Art Department Blog updating us on his experience as an art student and sent us some examples of his work. Thank you Francisco, it is so great to hear from you!

"Hello my name's Francisco. I study BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths University in London. Personal statements don’t fit my work, so instead I give you this:

 ~

Fake tourism

Acquired taste

Very present very useless

home to the homeless, the single

motherland

Peas not peace

...s

 ~

In art school, I'm allocated an individual studio space which I can use anytime. I'm free to learn skills in any of the specialist workshops: wood, metal, casting, ceramics, photography, textiles, printmaking, sound and multimedia. I present my work several times a term to peers and tutors, who are practising artists. I have lectures on visual cultures and write essays in response.

Everybody in the course comes from different countries and arts teaching backgrounds; for instance I know a guy in first year who so far has been an actor, stage engineer and primary school teacher. For the first time he is now painting. Somebody else has been trained their entire life in classical painting and is now giving it a go at making an installation with sea salt and toy figurines to express an idea that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. As the course is open and entirely self-directed, it’s most enriching to literally learn from each other.

Often students collaborate to organise exhibitions and performance events outside of art school to show their work - the school is happy to lend some equipment to mount shows.

I graduate next year. In the future I hope to be a practising artist. Or a writer. Or a curator. Or an interior or fashion designer. Or a carpenter. Or an educator. Or a tour guide. Or a masseuse. Or a something else that doesn't yet have a name. Or all of the above.

At best, one would hope to graduate from an art course with the technical confidence to produce any object, image or performance they have in mind; a sensibility to be able to sustain a creative contemporary practice (whether or not an art practice); and a knowledge of marketing strategies. However, like in any course, you only get as much as you make of it. So neither art nor any other course is ever an easy way out. To study a degree is to take a subject seriously. And to love it."

Video: http://vimeo.com/zhanfrancisco/idontknowhowtoknit

Update on ceramics

Explosion in the Art Department

Yesterday morning we opened the kiln door and found this....

I cannot really describe how it felt to see this, but what we had put in there the day before were three sculptures, one of which was a ring by Mariana Botte in year 13:

Needless to say, Mariana was heartbroken, and so was the whole staff who watched her spend weeks working on the details on this piece. Today, early in the morning I found her and convinced her to work on a new piece, not necessarily the same, but hopefully as interesting. Mariana made a huge effort to overcome her disappointment and a new piece is indeed being created. I hope I can share an image of it intact after firing it at half term. 

Luckily there are some stunning photographs if this ring. These things happen but we are never really prepared. Another piece in the kiln was a sculpted guitar by one of our year 11 students, the second version of a previously exploded guitar... Today we carved a third version. 

Whatever happens...we do not give up!

glass and glaze

Below are two images of a recent sculpture by Paola Kassakowska. One was taken before it was fired and the other is a detail of the glazed surface of the face. In case some of our viewers are not familiar with the word "glaze", here is the basic description of what glaze is made of (from wikipedia)

Ceramic glaze raw materials generally include silica, which will be the main glass former. Various metal oxides, such as sodium, potassiumand calcium, act as a flux to lower the melting temperature. Alumina, often derived from clay, stiffens the molten glaze to prevent it from running off the piece. Colorants, such as iron oxide, copper carbonate or cobalt carbonate, and sometimes opacifiers such as tin oxide orzirconium oxide, are used to modify the visual appearance of the fired glaze.

 

It is still not obvious, how glaze works, unless one is familiar with glass. I leave you a beautiful film where you can see how glass behaves in the making. A contrast between the traditional glass making and the industrial machines that produce glass items en masse.

Glas Glas won master film maker Bert Haanstra a well-deserved Academy Award® for Best Short Documentary in 1959. The film contrasts the production of hand made crystal from the Royal Leerdam Glass Factory with automated bottle making machines in the Netherlands. An industrial film with a bebop heart, its lyrical use of light and sound still looks and sounds fabulous, nearly 60 years after it was made. Director Biography: Bert Haanstra (May 1916 – October 1997), was an internationally acclaimed Dutch film maker with a career spanning four decades. Though he made several forays into fictional cinema, it is his documentaries, which cast a sidelong and often idiosyncratic glance at the human animal, for which he is best known. Director: Bert Haanstra Producer: Government of the Netherlands Running Time: 10 minutes Website: www.berthaanstra.nl/english.html

The making of an Elephant....

Carolina de Pontes has just completed an outstanding stoneware sculpture of an elephant. This was her creative response to the theme "FORCE"

The finalised sculpture

Threading the Patio

Dear followers, occasional visitors, students and colleagues,

 I have been away for a few days and am not functioning at high speed at the moment (please forgive the summer rhythm) but today I stumbled upon a few images of an Arts Festival that happened in 2008 at St. Julian's. If memory doesn't fail me, we didn't have an activities week as organised as we do now and we had a whole day arts related festival.
 I was responsible for conducting a workshop of paper and wire sculptures in the patio of the Palacio. After a few sessions I noticed we were accumulating a serious amount of interesting and delicate sculptures and I started thinking.....where am I going to hang all these??

So it came to me. We will thread the patio and hang everything on thread! Logical.
We used trees and windows to connect the cotton thread all over the patio. See below:

This was an ephemeral effort, a lot of the sculptures flew away quickly, but the effect was very good. The patio remained like this for a couple of days, covered by a giant spider's web. The cotton was slightly elastic and gave in slowly. The hight of the lines dropped until everybody had to zigzag above and below lines and knots. Very amusing....even if probably not the best idea in terms of health and safety!!!!!!  

Punching clay

Plaster of Paris, a lump of fresh clay and a good "macro" lens:

These experiments were made by Mariana, one of our year 12 students.

Ceramics in year 8

Awhile ago, in 2009, we explored ceramics in year 8, as we usually do in most year groups actually. I used a portuguese artist called Rafael Bordallo Pinheiro as a source of inspiration. Most people in Portugal are extremely familiar with this common design:

 Bordallo Pinheiro designed the well known cabbage motif that exists in the shape of bowls and plates but that was just a simple and more commercial design which has been produced in mass in the well known factory of Caldas da Raínha. Bordallo Pinheiro was also a very famous satirical cartoonist in the late 19th century. (look at examples of his work here)
I focused on more elaborate pieces such as the ones below, to inspire ou year 8 students to create their own pots and decorate them with animal or vegetable elements.

Here are the fabulous pots our talented students created:

 

 

 

Art, Science,Technology...and all those boxes

Theo Jansen

Triangles

On my previous post I showed you this sculpture by Tomás Candeias:

 

 

I mentioned how plaster was used to make it but now I wish to talk about the form. Tomás was trying to reduce all his work into basic, geometric forms. He explored the triangle in a variety of ways. See below:

Linoleum print - Tomás Candeias, y13

Linoleum print - Tomás Candeias, y13

Oil painting -Tomás Candeias, y13

Digital image - 4 colour channels - Tomás Candeias, y13

Silkscreen - Tomás Candeias, y13

 



PLASTER I

This past year we have had an unusual amount of work with plaster in our department. I want to show a few examples of how our students have used plaster to make moulds to produce sculptures or how sometimes the plaster is the sculpture itself.

Above are two figures made by one of our year 13 students Diana Vasconcellos. The human figure is Diana, or to be accurate a mod-roc mould of Diana. It is not a cast of Diana, but the mod-roc shell itself.  It is a three part mould joined together. When talking about casting in a y12 lesson the other day, I realised most people in the room were slightly confused about what a "cast" is. The other figure you see is a monkey which was built in cardboard and tape (using a similar technique to the year 9 sculptures based on Naum Gabo, posted a few days ago). The surface was then covered in plaster.

Here, Tomás Candeias is creating a high relief by
making a plaster mould of a carved linoleum  plate

Luisa Vasconcelos made a plaster mould of
a doll and photographed it in such a way that
 it is hard to discern which are the convex or the concave surfaces.

One of our year 11 students merged her own figure (another mod-roc mould)
with a couple of large horns, also mod-roc moulds, to create this mythical faun like creature.

Tomás Candeias in year 13 describes the process of making a series of pyramids in plaster to construct a sculpture
 



Here is Tomás Candeias' plaster sculpture complete