Creative students at Mount Kelly College are showing off their coursework at a free public exhibition for five days next week, including a special opening this Friday (June 21) .
Art, photography and design and technology departments are are opening their doors to the public for an Exhibition Open Evening from 5.30pm to 8pm this Friday as a ‘curtain-raiser’ and then from 9am to 4pm daily from Monday to Friday next week, June 24 to 28.
The exhibition, in the Westall Centre on the school site off Parkwood Road, is a celebration of the pupils’ examination work created over the past two years.
Netty Holwill, head of art and photography at Mount Kelly, said: “The imagination of our pupils from Years 10-13 has led to the creation of some wonderful, and unforgettable, pieces of design and art across a range of themes. Many of the pieces are highly original and thought-provoking and we are thrilled to invite the local community to the school to see them. We proudly nurture individuality and our pupils are encouraged to craft unique, skilful and imaginative creations.”
GCSE students had the task of painting portraits of their chosen teachers, while A-level students painted self-portraits on a large scale. Their course projects included creating fairground-style posters on a theme of their choice having seen real posters at Dingles Fairground Museum in Lifton. Many of the resulting posters reflected their social concerns including the Ukraine war, the environment and the Hadron Collider.
One piece demonstrating plastic pollution in the sea is a tank of beach sand littered with bleached white plastic packaging. Multitalented Sam’s large painting of boxers in the ring (including a fellow student boxer) has been chosen to feature on the exhibition poster.
As well as art and photography, the design and technology work is testament to the efforts of Sam Lawrence, design and technology teacher, who has used his expertise to support pupils in designing and developing high quality, functional and contemporary products.
The designs include jewellery boxes, bedside cabinets, a chest of drawers and a laptop workstation – all with clever design points to raise them above the purely functional. One bedside cabinet has built-in lighting, to avoid the need for a bedside lamp, another is drum-shaped with a rotating sliding lid, and resin patterns included in many.
Sam said: "Students have worked skilfully this year in the design and technology workshop using a variety of materials to design, develop and manufacture a range of stunning and unique products for their clients to effectively solve a spectrum of design problems. Alongside their practical work they have also produced portfolios crammed with research, development sketches, design thinking, computer-aided design modelling and evaluation pages that demonstrate skills that are very much in demand throughout the product design and engineering industries."
