VISUAL ARTS

TERM 4 UPDATES IN THE VISUAL ARTS

A warm welcome back to Term 4 from the Visual Arts faculty. We hope you enjoyed a restful break and have returned with plenty of ideas and inspiration to apply to your own creative practice!

Each year, the Glen Eira Youth Service organises a Youth Art Competition, open to anyone in the Glen Eira area, aged 5-25 to showcase their creative talents. The theme for 2022 was ‘SELF-EXPRESSION’ and we also ran the same theme for our quarterly McKinnon School Art Competition to encourage student participation. 

We are very pleased to share that McKinnon students Heidi Robertson-Reid Year 11 (14-17 years) and Isla Walsh Year 7 (10-13 years) took out the prizes for their age categories, with Heidi’s amazing animation and Isla’s detailed portrait painting, ‘Unmasked’. Both works are currently on display at the Glen Eira Town Hall Gallery. Notably, this is not Isla’s first art prize for 2022, she also won The National Design Files Kids Art Award (11-13 years category) judged by prominent Australian contemporary Artists including Reko Rennie, Beci Orpin and Ken Done with a coloured pencil portrait.

Heidi Robertson-Reid

Watch Heidi Robertson Reid's winning animation 

Isla Walsh

Traditionally, to celebrate the achievements of all Visual Arts students at McKinnon, we host an end-of-year exhibition. This year, to welcome back the opportunity to exhibit our work physically rather than virtually and showcase our two outstanding campuses, we will be hosting a Junior AND a Senior Art Show! The Senior Art Show features work from Years 10, 11 and 12 and will take place at the Main Campus on Wednesday 16 November. 

The Junior Art Show features paintings, drawings, ceramics, digital art and 3D printed and laser cut sculptures from Years 7-9 and will be held at our East Campus on Monday 5 December. Please stay tuned to Compass for further details, including times and guest speakers, and keep your eyes peeled for promotional materials coming soon. 

Finally, we extend our congratulations to our Units 3/4 Studio Arts, Media and Visual Communication Design students as they put the finishing touches on their folios and finals. 

The ‘School Assessed Task’ or ‘SAT’ as it is more commonly known, represents the largest portion of the learning across Units 3 and 4 in each Visual Arts study design and contributes most significantly to the study score. Managing such a large task requires students to operate with high levels of organisation, communication, motivation, time-management and a healthy dose of creative problem solving. 

Many students will feel an immense sense of relief to have completed their SAT. We remind them to take a moment as work is handed in, to reflect back on the whole process and appreciate how far they have come in developing their technical and conceptual abilities. 

We sincerely thank their Arts teachers from Years 7-12 for laying such a solid creative foundation on which to build and we wish our future artists, designers and media producers every success in their upcoming exams. We know you will study hard!

Ms Jessica Rogosic & Mr Peter Eglezos

Visual Arts Learning Area Managers

ART COMPETITIONS AT MCKINNON

Art competitions at McKinnon are held during each school term, and winners are determined by our students and teachers through online voting. It’s been so exciting to see the whole school community get involved! 

Entries this year have consisted of a wide range of media and methods including colored pencil drawings, acrylic paintings, digital artworks and more. This year the Art Captains and Art Teachers collaborated to develop the four competition themes; Portraiture, Art Not War, Self-Expression and Extreme Contrast. 

Congratulations to all students who created and submitted artwork for the competitions this year and thank you to everyone for getting involved and voting for your favourite artworks!

The 2022 winners are: 

Term 1: David Dou Year 7, Anthe Limogiannis Year 8 & Areia Snell Year 10. 

Theme: Portraiture. 

Term 2: Eli Lasnitzki Year 11. 

Theme: Art, Not War.

Term 3: Isla Walsh Year 7 & Heidi Robertson-Reid Year 11. 

Theme: Self-Expression (Glen Eira Youth Council Art Competition).

Term 4, Theme: Extreme Contrast. 

The winners for the Term 4 competition will be announced in early 2023! 

Keep an eye out!

Lehan Ding

Senior Visual Art Captain