Art Inspiration everywhere
It’s not every day you meet a bona fide collector and supporter of contemporary art. But our Year 11 Visual Arts students were lucky to meet John Kaldor AO on their recent excursion.
As Head of Visual Arts Ms Brennan explained, the Year 11 Art excursion to the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Gallery of NSW was memorable for so many different reasons.
“It was inspiring to experience the wonders of the contemporary British artist, Cornelia Parker at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Her large-scale installations rely on the fragmentation of matter, blasted from its original form causing the viewing audience to see the mundane in new and exciting ways. This was particularly apparent in Cold Dark Matter, in which she explodes, crushes and fragments a garden shed with the help of explosives from the British army. She sees this act of destruction as an archetypal act that stems from childhood memories, connecting to the history of London during the Blitz. Cornelia Parker, in her reassembling of these splintered shards creates the extraordinary from the very ordinary.
Our time spent at the Art Gallery of NSW was a very eventful experience allowing us to engage deeply with the contemporary collection and meet John Kaldor AO. An arts philanthropist to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, he has been one of the most significant benefactors and collectors of contemporary art in Australia.
We met him by chance as we viewed some of his vast collection in the contemporary section of the gallery, and we were lucky enough to ask him some questions. He was excited to tell us that his granddaughter is a student in the Junior School at 韩国AV.
We were truly inspired by the amazing quality and scope of the Bodies of Work at ArtExpress, enabling us to envision some goals for our own artmaking practice. Finally, we visited some key artworks from the Australian collection that we had studied in previous years but had only seen in the virtual world.
Engaging with them as real artworks in the gallery setting, taking into consideration their surface qualities, scale, lighting and even their placement in the gallery was invaluable to our understanding.”