The Year 10 exhibition celebrating Alexander Calder
with lasting life-skills remaining central to their learning. While it is clear that the students’ individual efforts offered enormous diversity of approach, it was the collective sense of drive, focus and a desire to push the boundaries that created a unified sense of occasion at each Private View. A special place in The Store’s calendar was marked by Calder Re- Imagined , the Art department’s first ever exhibition produced solely by our Year 10 GCSE artists. Responding to the work of Alexander Calder, 34 students commandeered the entire top floor of The Store’s gritty and automatically industrial art space. Themes such as balance, kineticism and symmetry were developed back in the studios to produce diverse drawn and three-dimensional ideas using an expansive array of materials. As a learning experience, the final pieces on show are now the decisive starting point for further adventures, with many of the exhibiting Year 10 artists subsequently absorbed in their sketchbooks during the St Ives residential drawing trip. If artists really do find the meaning in everything, as Peter Randall Page declared to the assembled students and parents at the opening of Variations on a Theme , then the Dulwich Art department is in no hurry to find all of the answers just yet. In short, isn’t this what we are all about? Marrying tradition with contemporary practice, risk-taking and boundary breaking, valuing diversity. Facilitating space for the bold and brash, as well as the small and sensitive; celebrating the humour, absurdity and occasionally even the rightly provocative. A year of firsts, maybe; but not for the last time.
Work by Robbie Allcock (Year 13)
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