Visual Arts Faculty

From the Co-ordinator of Visual Arts

Manly Excursion Year 10 Visual Arts and Photography and Digital Media. 

On Tuesday 19 May, our Year 10 Photography and Year 10 Visual Arts students travelled to Manly to take part in a series of immersive workshops designed to launch their upcoming assessments. Visual Arts students explored the theme A Sense of Place, while Photography students began developing ideas for their world‑building unit title hand vs machine. Lucky for us the weather behaved beautifully.

For Photography students, the day centred on collaboration, idea generation, observation, creative problem‑solving, and collecting visual assets for their next summative task. In this project, students will construct an original world either a utopia (an ideal, harmonious society) or a dystopia (a world shaped by oppression, suffering, or injustice) and inspired by a punk aesthetic.

Students spent the morning along the Manly Esplanade completing a photographic scavenger hunt, gathering textures, objects, and environmental details to use later in their composite worlds. They then undertook a collaborative filming task using mirror tiles and lensballs to experiment with distortion, reflection, and perspective.

To guide their dystopian storytelling, students selected one of three quotes from George Orwell’s 1984:

Quote A — Surveillance “Big Brother is watching you.”

Quote B — Memory & Control “Who controls the past controls the future.”

Quote C — Secrets & Identity “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” 

Working in groups, they interpreted their chosen quote through a 40–60 second dystopian video sequence, filmed on location at the Corso and Manly Beach. In the afternoon, students returned to school to edit their footage using Premiere Pro and refine their visual narratives.

The Visual Arts students continued along the coastline to Shelly Beach from the Esplanade, completing a series of guided artmaking activities led by their teachers.

The Visual Arts workshops were designed to inspire students as they begin developing their Body of Work for the concept A Sense of Place. Throughout the day, students explored a range of drawing techniques utilising a range of media such as charcoal, water colour, white pen and fine liner, building their observational skills, and experimenting to capture the unique character of the Manly and Shelly Beach environments. Additional photographs were taken to support the development of their work back in the classroom later that day. A warm thank‑you to the Visual Arts team for their guidance, expertise, and encouragement throughout the day. Their support helped students push their creative boundaries and gain confidence in their developing artistic practice.