Visual Arts

The world is saturated by visual imagery.

The visual arts provide forms of communication that inform where we have come from and how this has shaped our current place in the world.

By engaging in the visual arts, students assimilate, create, produce, and respond critically through visual communication (in all its forms) and contribute to the process of social and cultural development.

Visual communication is one of the most essential ways of communicating and interpreting our identity as individuals, groups, or communities and how we interact with each other, the group, or the community and world we live in.

Visual arts connect mind, heart, body, and spirit as students learn to express their thoughts, feelings, ideas, and actions in the development and creation of visual art works.

Through studying and making art works, students respond to and make sense of themselves and their community, their society, and the world in new and different ways.

Students become reflective thinkers within the creative process, able to formulate problems and apply inquiry to generate new knowledge and or understandings.

Through the process of generation, critique, synthesis, and production, students develop skills transferable to other areas of their lives and knowledge that informs critical analysis and invention.

Through applied research and practice within the visual arts, students investigate and challenge established ways of art making in New Zealand and/or internationally and generate new responses and processes. They gain confidence in their questioning and research skills and in their ability to synthesise complex and diverse information.

Learners in the visual arts become productive contributors to and informed commentators within local, national, and global communities particularly through exhibitions of their work, collaborations, and interactions with audiences.

They understand, interpret, and communicate the meanings and values of visual symbols from Aotearoa, the Pacific, and beyond.