BACKIn a recording-breaking year for NZQA Scholarships across the college, in the Visual Arts Department we are proud to celebrate the success of a particularly remarkable student, a 2024 Summa Cum Laude Esther Shen who, while also achieving Scholarships in both English and Calculus, gained Scholarships in three visual arts subjects – Painting, Printmaking, and Photography, with an Outstanding Scholarship grade in Painting – on top of Excellence folio grades in all three media.
For Scholarship in the visual arts students are required to submit a detailed eight-page workbook alongside their three board folio, exploring their creative investigation with depth and insight.
These results place Esther at the very top of Level 3 visual arts students across the country, and adding to this, her Printmaking board was also selected for the prestigious Top Art, a touring exhibition of the best visual arts folio boards submitted in 2024. Her work will be seen across the South Island.
Much of Esther’s creative practice over the last two years has explored paper – its materiality, how it operates as a carrier of knowledge, and both its significance and its invisibility as an art-making media in its own right. These ideas were the basis for both her Painting and Photography folios and Scholarship submissions.
For her stunning Printmaking board Esther explored ideas of space and faith, engaging in an extended investigation of her church and its history, working with a range of printmaking techniques to fragment and deconstruct spaces of religious and spiritual significance.
Her Photography teacher, Head of Department Paul Stevens, and her Printmaking and Painting teacher, Curriculum Leader of Printmaking Nicola Ov, are understandably incredibly proud of Esther, and hope that her success inspires more students to aim for success in the visual arts at this level.
Her work represents what can be achieved when students develop a holistic creative practice leading up to Level 3, and the results that can be achieved through the cross-pollination of working in multiple media, as well as by collaborating with teachers and students across the department, including in our regular Scholarship Workshops.
Esther is going on to study architecture at the University of Auckland and we wish her all the next for her future creative endeavours.
