MAC - Lake Macquarie’s Museum of Art and Culture, yapang celebrated the grand opening on Sunday, 27February featuring outstanding HSC Visual Arts students in the ‘First Class 21’ exhibition.

St Clare’s Class of 2021 - Rickardd Weiley and Isabella Hayes were selected from our region.

Employing a variety of expressive forms this year’s cohort has examined concepts encompassing identity, subjectivity, family memory, isolation, ecological responsibilities, fear and nostalgia.  Intimate artworks explore complex connection between home, identity, personal relationships and culture.  Many of the works highlight a vulnerability and sensitivity that offers an insight into the inter-related role of the artist, the artwork, the audience, and the world.  Several the artworks also pose questions to the viewer and prompt further introspection.

It was exciting to watch on with the student’s families who all travelled to attend the opening.  An outstanding achievement and a pleasure to spend time with the talented Rickardd and Isabella.

First Class runs from Monday, 28 February through to Sunday, 8 May 2022.

We are hoping to take our Stage 5 & 6 Creative Arts students to the exhibition in coming weeks.

Rickardd Weiley
remedy for memory
Sculpture
ARTIST STATEMENT

Youth is both fleeting and fragile; it’s a moment in time that is bound to fracture and depart before you get the chance to realise its significance.  However, art has the power to capture, protect, and preserve moments of time so that the memory may never completely fade.  This concept became the soul of my artwork, in which I aspired to capture my youth through one piece.  I wanted to take significant and formative memories and have each displayed, transforming each memory into a physical representation.  That may be by encapsulating the flowers that bloom each year in my yard in jars I found in the back of my family pantry.  Or lines of poems I composed on the hardwood floors of my childhood room.  Or polaroids capturing my final summer being a teenager, the adventures I had with friends who have come and left.  Or the shells I had collected that same summer each day I found escape on the beach.  Or the origami patterns I learnt from my host family in Japan.  By capturing these moments, I have found the remedy for my memory so that I may continue to create more.

Isabella Hayes
From Eden
Painting
ARTIST STATEMENT

Ever-growing avoidance of the outside world has caused myself to detach from reality.  For me, my body of work represents a quiet place of perfect harmony I can escape to, away from the sometimes-overwhelming pressure and anxiety the world provides.  From Eden is an allusion to The Garden of Eden in the Bible, which symbolises a paradise offered to humanity. It was this title, as well as my appropriation of scenes from Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli animations, that structured the base of my concept.  My artistic intent in using gouache in small dots was to convey the intrinsic beauty of this utopia in every detail.

Lyndall Laurie
Visual Arts Teacher