House Art Competition
To encourage students to undertake a creative endeavour during their recent time in isolation, students at The Ridgeway Campus were able to score points creatively for their respective houses. This year’s House Art Competition saw students submitting a very high standard of work, inspired by COVID-19, in a wide range of categories such as Drawing, Painting, Film, Short Story, Poem and much more.
Each submission was scored on a scale of 0 – 10 based on the creativity, effort and skill displayed and that score was added to the house total. Bonus points were awarded for submissions that had a social distancing or pandemic theme. Students were also allowed to collaborate on their work so long as there was no breach of social distancing rules and collaborators were from the same house.
The House Art Competition enabled students to make sense of what was happening around them with some looking back to the great works of our time and reimagining them through a new lens. Other students were inspired by their neighbourhoods and the community they discovered around them. The results were recently announced with Thoresby finishing first with a score of 66, including submissions from 11 students. Lincoln House came in second with 53 points from 10 submissions. Athelstane came third with 46 points from nine submissions and Sherwood finished fourth with 40 points from seven submissions.
Year 12 student Jemima reflected on her work, The View
My piece, The View reflects on the atmosphere of the community in the middle of the COVID-19 crisis. While everyone was forced to stay indoors some of the only views into other people’s lives was through the windows of the houses, and when I went for walks it would be interesting to see how people set up workspaces in their front windows, for practical considerations (the sun brings in good lighting conditions for zoom calls). However, the side effect of this was a glimpse into spaces and work routines, as on repeated walks I would sometimes see people working in certain houses each time. Many also put up pieces of art in their windows, and I know that many of us in my community put up drawings of rainbows in the window as a sort of eye spy game for children in the neighbourhood and as a symbol of community. I used red thread to link these windows that I drew for practical reasons but also as a sort of symbolic connection, of humanity and fate, looking to the thread of the Moirai of Greek myth. I am lucky to have houses with some beautiful lead lighting in their front window, which provided ample inspiration for my work.
