Contemporary Art

Students will explore contemporary art practices in a day of activities with two of Melbourne’s leading and most innovative contemporary arts organisations.

Get hands on at Testing Grounds in the workshop, Smashing Things with Hammers.

Testing Grounds is a vast, stress free space that invites fun, messy and physically creative exploration by young minds. In this workshop, students are introduced the concept of Process Art and learn how art can be just as much about the process as the outcome. It introduces play—through the destruction and reconstruction of everyday objects—as a critically important skill that professional artists use to generate creative process, ideas and discourse.

Using Jackie Winsors ‘Exploded Piece’ (1980-1982) as a starting point students are engaged in a short lecture about the historically significant Process Artworks and then given the opportunity to try out some process art themselves. Students finish the workshop by presenting their reconstructed objects to the group.

Students then visit the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) for TALK THINK MAKE - a 90-minute inquiry-based responding and making program directly linked to ACCA’s exhibitions. Using contemporary art as stimulus, students will learn and apply critical and creative thinking skills to make connections between the art and ideas presented in exhibitions, before making their own artworks to take with them.