Junior School held their fabulous annual Art Exhibition this week, here’s an overview of the Exhibition themes by Year Group, along with an in-depth article on how Year 1 explored their castle designs. 

Nursery 

Nursery have been inspired by the work of Yayoi Kusama, a contemporary Japanese artist. One thing all her work has in common, is dots! Lots of them. This has led to her being often referred to as the ‘Princess of Polka Dots’. 

Nursery’s topic this term is ‘Colour and Pattern’. Using the colour wheel, we added coloured dots using complimentary colours or primary and secondary colour mixes. A “mini me” dressed in style of Kusama completes each box room. 

Reception 

As part of Maths Week and their ‘Minibeasts’ topic, Reception have designed hotels for bugs. Using graph paper and various polygons to build up each original design, the girls have also considered where each minibeast might stay.  

Year 1 

Year 1 have been exploring the topic of ‘Castles’ this year and, on our “Artist in Residence” day, each girl made an individual ‘relief’ picture of a castle and worked together to paint and assemble a large cardboard castle installation. 

Year 2 

As a link between Year 2’s topic of ‘The fire of London’ we made Tudor houses with black and white half timbered detail and the addition of flames bursting through their structures. The houses look fabulousl assembled together as a neighbourhood. 

Year 3          

Year 3 worked in clay to explore the theme of architecture. They began by exploring texture by adding clay surface and incising into it. The girls then built on these techniques in order to create a textural tile of the façade of a house.  

Year 4 

Year 4 girls have explored architectural form through the medium of mono-printing. The girls looked closely at doorways. They explored two colour prints and most ambitiously worked collaboratively to produce large prints of the Chrysler building in New York and the Lloyds building in London. 

Year 5 

Year 5 have made intricate studies of buildings which they painted in watercolours. They used tracing techniques to produce a mirror image of their drawings and used this design as a vehicle to demonstrate an understanding of colour theory.  

In addition, some Year 5 girls completed a shoe box diorama of an architectural interior. This project takes inspiration from the work of the artist and illustrator Lauren Child. She used this technique to illustrate her version of ‘The Princess and the Pea’. Photographs of the completed rooms are also included in the exhibition. 

Year 6  

Year 6 have made polystyrene prints based on typical London houses. They explored ways of representing pattern and architectural detail in simple black and white. The girls experimented with their printing blocks on a variety of coloured papers. 

Year 6 have also made house sculptures from terracotta clay. To do this, they had to learn how to construct using clay slabs and needed to produce a two dimensional ‘net’ from which they cut their shapes. The girls then used a variety of techniques to explore pattern and surface texture on their houses. 

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Year 1 explore castle designs in Artist in Residence 

Continuing the Architecture theme of this year's Junior Art Exhibition, Year 1 have been working on individual and collaborative artworks inspired by castles. Picking up on our focus on the continent of Europe and Traditional Tales, the girls have been making and decorating individual 3D relief models of castles. To do so, we have investigated the materials and appearance of castles from around Europe. Some girls chose to make more dilapidated and mossy structures, whilst others kept their castles neat and tidy. The girls have used cutting, folding and scoring techniques to shape the towers and battlements from cardboard flats and tubes. Constructing doors that open, including via a drawbridge, has challenged the girls further to find an additional design and engineering solution.   
 

Each Year 1 class has also worked collaboratively on painting a castle installation. Using what we have learnt about the patterns made by stone walls, the girls have painted the castles by mixing tints and shades. We rebuilt these massive structures for this week’s Summer Exhibition.