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Making: Your Melting Pot

Student learning materials and activities

VISUAL ARTS

MAKE

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What are the diverse backgrounds of the people who make up the community?

 

How have they contributed to the development and character of the community?

 

What is celebrated and commemorated in your community and what does this say about your community’s diversity?

 

What symbols and emblems represent your community and its people?

 

Can you draw these or represent them through art materials?

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Q

Now, you have the opportunity to create an artwork that represents the diversity in your community, or in other words, your Melting Pot.

Create a visual artwork that represents Your Melting Pot

Well done!

You have now learnt about:

  • The elements and principles of art

  • Visual art mediums and techniques

  • Analysed and appraised Louisa Buaderci’s There are some things I think you ought to know… and Michael Cook’s Majority Rule.

Consider which techniques, materials and elements of art will help you create an artwork that tells the audience about your Melting Pot.

 

Make your artwork.

 

Decide how to frame, mount and present your artwork.

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Write an artist’s statement.

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Provide details of your artwork

Title: __________________________________________________________________________________________________

Name of artist: ______________________________________________________________________________________

Year created: ________________________________________________________________________________________

Mediums used:_______________________________________________________________________________________

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Describe the artwork.

 

Elements and Principles of Art - Use the elements and principles of art to describe your work

Medium – What did you use to create your artwork? Water colour, clay etc?

Subject matter – What is your artwork of? Plants, people etc

Inspiration – who or what inspired you to make decisions and choices about your artwork?

 

Choose 2-3 questions to add detail to your artist statement

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  • What happened along the way?

    • Did anything interesting or unusual happen? 

    • Did you solve any problems in the process?

  • Did the project turn out how you expected? Why or why not?

  • What did you learn when making your art?

  • What would you do differently next time?

  • Why is your artwork important to you?

(Young Artists, n.d.)

EXAMPLE

The Future is bright

Artist Natasha Cowey

Date 2017

Location Created Adelaide

Medium Mixed Media - Gouache, soft pastels and Ink Jet on paper

This is an example of a final response to the task Make: Your Melting Pot

Research and think about your community.

How to write and artist's statement 

My artwork is an abstract landscape, created using multi-media and various techniques. The background has been painted with gouache. Representing the sky, sky blue and streaks of white and other shades of blue are painted in large wavy lines across the top of the page. Two large curved/wavy shapes cut across the centre of the sky and merge into each other. The first, starting wide on the left and gradually getting thinner across the page has a black background with Aboriginal symbols (travelling/journey and resting place and campsites) painted on top in earth tones. This contrasts with the second streak which starts small behind the first and grows wider towards the left of the page. This second shape is made up of short overlapping dashes in black, white and primary and secondary colours inspired by the bright colours used by Louisa Bufardeci’s representation of Melbourne demographics. In the middle-ground there is a digitally created cityscape. A photograph (Roberts, 2010, September 11) of Adelaide, South Australia’s cityscape was used as a base with partially transparent flags (Ausflags, 2017 and Flagpedia, n.d.) to be layered over the buildings before a filter was applied using the iPad app PhotoLab. A gauche painted ship sits on top of a wave drawn with soft pastels in the foreground.

 

This artwork represents the journey and changes to Adelaide, South Australia and its people. Starting on the left, the ship represents the colonisation of Adelaide in 1836 by the British and Australia’s first people, are represented by the black wave and Aboriginal symbols. Adelaide’s increasing diversity and multiculturalism is represented by the rainbow wave and the flags of the birth nations of South Australia’s population.


During the making process, I tried lots of different techniques and ideas to represent Adelaide’s Melting Pot. I wanted to represent the development of the community and its increasing diversity over the years. Layering the flags over the city with the building still visible was quite difficult but using an app to make the image brighter and apply a filter made the flags and photo blend together. My favourite part of my artwork is the bright colours and how the flags and city blend together.

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