BACKLast year saw some stellar Scholarship results in the Visual Arts. Students across three media at Level 3 (Painting, Photography, and Design) went above and beyond to submit superb folios and accompanying Scholarship submissions. These are competitive levels of study and students are required to demonstrate an advanced depth of thinking for Scholarship in the Visual Arts. Students are required to submit eight A3 pages of research and reflection along with their three board folio.
A total of 14 students achieved Scholarships in the Visual Arts in 2023. There were five in Painting, three in Design, and six in Photography. Two students, Stefan Mishkovski in Painting and Gabriella Olla in Photography, gained further recognition through their inclusion in the prestigious Top Art exhibition. It will tour the country displaying the very top folios from across the motu. Below are six examples of top folios for 2023:
- Yingxi (Helen) Zhang gained Excellence and Scholarship in Photography, exploring isolation and loss of interpersonal connections in our modern society.
- Shi Yu (Linda) Chen gained Excellence and Scholarship in Photography, exploring the repetitiveness and restrictions of our everyday working life.
- Rebecca Lee gained Scholarship in Design, creating designs for a food festival with music, and looking at the relationship between healthy food and diabetes.
- Hye Hyun (Breanna) Seo gained Excellence and Scholarship in Design, creating a graphic novel of self discovery within the school environment.
- Jane Zhang achieved Excellence and Scholarship in Painting by examining her connection to food and how this was influenced by pressure to eat vegetables as a small child.
- Hyun Young (Jennifer) Kim achieved Excellence and Scholarship in Painting, and her work looks at the pressures of academic school life.
- Stefan Mishkovski’s Scholarship and Top Art board explores conformity, vulnerability, and fragility through a lens of neurodivergence and uses the supposedly safe, but somewhat superficial comforts of the home as a metaphor for this. The furniture opens up revealing its insides, much like masking can hide our true selves.
