The Y13 art students recently had their art exhibition. We, a grand total of three students, curated our own small-scale exhibitions and set up during the school day.

 We faced quite a few bumps in our process, it was definitely a learning curve for us, especially as we did not have tools to hang our pieces. The whole experience felt very independent, and we all had to use our creativity to accomplish our goals. The three of us all have drastically different art styles, and although we had our own areas to set up, I feel like the exhibition was a good reflection of our collaboration and, albeit small, artistic community.

A view of our exhibition space.

Cecilia Cao, fellow art student, standing in front of her work.

Shiyuan Lin, fellow art student, sitting with her work.

Myself, sitting in front of “No Labels”.

It was really interesting setting up and creating our own exhibitions; the work we had to put in on the day, as well as the countless hours of creating and brainstorming for our pieces felt unbelievably worth it. But the sense of accomplishment was accompanied by waves of sadness; the art exhibition felt like a real, solid, tangible representation of the end of high school.

With IB, we spent two years of not only our art classes, but a good portion of our own time, to create work for this exhibition. Although graduation is right around the corner, the finality of this chapter of our lives still hadn’t occurred to me. Art has always had a constant presence in my life throughout the years of growing up, and so, to me, this exhibition seemed to also mark an ending to our “childhood”. These emotions only really struck as I was cutting off all the fishing wire and taking down the pieces we had painstakingly hung up; it was a conclusion that I didn’t realise was a conclusion, until that exact moment.

Rene Lin, live modelling my textile piece “Atardecer”.

My interactive installation and film, “A Conversation Between my Father and I”

Discussing my art with a few of my teachers.

Cecilia discussing her art work.

Zoe discussing her art with our principle, Mr. Thomas.

Myself with Echo and Ian

Cecilia standing in front of one of her pieces in the series “The Four Beauties”

A beautiful collage piece by Cecilia

Conversing with my art teacher, Mrs. Geankoplis.

Zoe discussing her artwork.

I would really like to thank everyone who helped us set up or came to show support. I’m thankful for my parents for being supportive of my art, and for staying late to ensure everything looked top notch. 

I would also like to thank Echo and Ian, two Year 12 art students, who hung up every single one of my pieces from the ceiling, whilst being extremely patient and supportive. I really do owe it all to them, especially as I couldn’t even reach the ceiling to hang any of my pieces and was freaking out for most of the time.

That’s all for now, I will have a more in-depth explanation and display of my pieces in my next blog post! 

The three Y13 art students, sitting with relief after our exhibition.

Thank you to Mr. Payne and Echo for a large portion of the photographs featured in this blog post.