Art Trips

Every year we aim to run a variety of short Art Trips so that pupils can gain a healthy reminder of how art fits within the world beyond school. Of course we have a wealth of opportunities to see art on our doorstep and in fact we often walk the students the few hundred metres along Bootham to the York City Gallery, which shows a world-class programme of exhibitions and displays.

YORKSHIRE SCULPTURE PARK

Slightly further afield (an hour on a bus) there is the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) and the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield both of which have become a ‘staple’ part of our trip programme. This year we took our Fourth Form pupils to the YSP on a sunny day in September and there they were treated to a number of different exhibitions throughout the park. From the fiercely confident ‘blocky’ sculptures and paintings by Turner Prizewinner Sean Scully to the more ethereal and delicate installation by Chiharu Shiota in the Chapel, mixed in with the permanent displays of sculptures by iconic sculptor, Henry Moore, there was something for everyone, and the work seen by the students provided ‘starting points’ for much of the work they produced over the following few months.

“We have a wealth of opportunities to see art on our doorstep.”

THE HEPWORTH GALLERY

The Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield is a very different experience, being housed within the urban tangle of Wakefield’s industrial heritage, the award-winning building houses an eclectic mix of exciting contemporary art. We drove the Lower Sixth Form artists over for a morning in January, where they saw the permanent collection housing work by Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, amongst others, but also dynamic and cutting edge work in the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture. Work within this exhibition challenged the pupils to think ‘out of the box’ in terms of the possibilities of contemporary sculpture, and certainly inspired some to push boundaries within their own work.

“This exhibition challenged the pupils to think ‘out of the box’ in terms of the possibilities of contemporary sculpture.”

PARIS

In addition to these short one-day excursions we also run a couple of residential courses, most notable perhaps is our annual Upper Sixth Form trip to Paris. This year we were treated to the most wonderful springtime weather all weekend, as we spent two days walking our excited Art and History of Art pupils through the wealth of cultural venues and galleries throughout the city. Paris is wonderfully compact and within a square mile of the ‘Isle de la Cite’ one can see so much. Within three days we managed to experience Art and Architecture that spanned from the 13th Century windows at Sainte-Chapelle through the artistic revolution of the late 19th Century at the Musee d’Orsay, the biting radicalism of the early 20th Century at the Picasso Museum, and finally through to the most contemporary of 20th and 211st Century Art at the Pompidou Centre. We even managed to visit Notre Dame only days before it was engulfed in flames! Eating the most delicious French food and wandering the charming streets of the Marais towards our hotel, it was a wonderful taste of European Culture at its best.

Mrs Charlotte Chisholm