Love Is Enough was the name of the Art exhibition we visited at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford. A joint exhibition curated by the artist Jeremy Deller, it featured the work of Nineteenth Century artist, socialist and writer William Morris, and renowned leader of Pop Art, Andy Warhol. After a short but illuminating talk by the gallery education leader, students then made sketches of the exhibits. Some of the items on display were very rare and fragile. It was explained that a magnificent tapestry over 6 feet long, designed by Morris would only be displayed 7 more times because of its fragility: it would then be kept in storage.
Next we visited the Pitt Rivers Museum. This museum is a visual feast stuffed with extraordinary relics of past cultures and civilisations, most ghoulish being shrunken heads! Here students explored the collection in search of items connected to their coursework topic of Mexico. Year 10 artists worked really well and produced some lovely studies during the day.
Year 12 photographers were challenged to photograph in varied situations. They visited the Covered Market to capture the atmosphere of this busy shopping venue, before re-joining the group at the Pitt Rivers Museum, housed in the Natural History Museum. The difficulty at Pitt Rivers was to take good images with very low light levels, but the stunning Victorian Gothic architecture and dinosaur fossils of the Natural History provided a mesmerizing combination of subjects. Students experimented with a variety of colour films, filters and distorting lenses. Here are some of the images produced:
