RHB Art Show Catalogue 2023-24 by Royal High School Bath

Saskia Bell

Year 13

IB Visual Arts

Going to Trowbridge Art Foundation

When I began my time at RHS in Year 9, I was feeling overwhelmed in a new school and a new country. I felt somewhat out of my depth in all my lessons except one, and that was art. I loved the art school the moment I entered. Sunlight poured through the windows, and paint-splattered floors told of boundless creativity. This creative energy was greatly encouraged from my very first lesson, and has never faltered since. Mr Preedy was my initial art teacher at RHS; he praised my first homework task as being a bold and brave painting, despite the fact that I had practically never touched a paintbrush before and had little planned besides putting brush to paper! That first painting was inspired by one of Kurt Jackson’s seascapes, chosen as it reminded me of the ocean I’d grown up beside in Australia. Mr Preedy’s unwavering yet gentle encouragement meant I dared to consider choosing GCSE Art, when prior to those initial Year 9 art lessons I would never have given it second thought.

My GCSE black book is still one of my favourite sketchbooks. Throughout those two years, I continued to receive encouragement from all my art teachers to be bold and brave. Such a space for creative experimentation allowed me to be fearless within my artmaking. It pushed me to explore further concepts and technical skills, without expectations of perfection or finished work and the limitations they would impose. Subsequently, my love and appreciation of artmaking deepened, prompting me to consider a creative future. This began by taking IB Art as a higher level subject. It gave me even broader opportunities to be bold; when curating my exhibition at the end of Year 13, I was (quite literally) given blank walls to make my own. I therefore considered completely new curatorial facets. For instance, the interaction between space and viewer. I explored my final concept of childhood and memory through ways such as hanging my works relatively low to mirror a child’s own curation or space.

Throughout my last two years in school I attended life drawing classes, which were often the highlight of my week. These life studies from direct observation greatly deepened both my understanding of human form and technical skill.

Following on from my artistic journey at RHS, I am eager to continue my creative passion at Trowbridge Art Foundation Course. I will have opportunities to try a wide variety of creative pathways (including fashion, architecture, and fine art) before specialising in one. I have loved numerous creative areas during school, such as: life drawing sessions using oil pastels; work experience in Year 12 summer at two architecture firms designing a garden pavilion and a holiday house; and my work with textiles during GCSE Design Technology, and both GCSE and IB Art.

This leaves my career art-based yet undetermined. Whatever path I pursue, I am excited to see where my creative journey takes me!

Welcome to the Royal High School Bath

Summer Art Show Exhibition 2024

I am delighted to share with you this year’s wealth of creativity and invention from our A Level Art and Photography students, IB Visual Arts Students and our GCSE Year 11 cohort. When I reflect on this year, highlighted by putting up the wide range of work on show, I am acutely aware of how privileged I feel being able to work alongside these young people and watch their creative journeys unfold. To see them take creative risks, wonder and discover and ultimately find that they can create their own visual language, emphasises the reason why being an Art Teacher has become my passion.

How fantastic to be reminded daily that creativity takes bravery and in the words of the late, great Ken Robinson; “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” What a wise way to approach learning and life and something that we celebrate in The Graeme Preedy Art School every day.

Having just visited the Trowbridge Art Foundation show last week I was overcome by the intense excitement in the room borne out of hard work and new beginnings. Many of the students who had studied with us last year are heading to their University of choice for Fashion, Fine Art, 3D Design and Engineering. I was struck by how much they had matured in the year since they left The Royal High and I felt so proud of the part we had played in securing their creative futures. Their passion to create had fuelled their journey and with so much ahead of them to inspire and motivate I am excited to see which creative industry there new path will take them into.

This passion to create reminded me of the words of another great speaker, Chris Stephens, Director of the Holburne, who, when opening the ‘Mr Doodle’ and ‘Henry Moore in Miniature’ exhibition recently, commented on the works unlikely juxtaposition within the formal gallery space. However, after doing this he made the fantastic observation that actually what connects these artists together is their“compulsion to create.” How beautifully summarised and how lucky I feel to be able to share the work of these young people whose compulsion to create has allowed this wonderful exhibition to take place.

Here’s to living in a world filled with creativity for many years to come, I do hope you enjoy the work on show.

Hannah Wilson Head of Art

Front Cover: Natasha David Back Cover: Emily Wang

With special thanks to Claire Worthy who helped us immensely with the photographing of the work for the book this year www.newtonandworthy.com

Natasha David

Annabelle Douch

Hannah Jauss

Isabella Jiang

Luella John

Nicole Kong

Chloe Moorhouse

Imogen Oliphant

Olivia Payne

Lucy Stimson

Emily Wang

Emily Whiteley

Saskia Bell

Billie Hutric IB

Jess Knechtli IB

Lotte Luemkemann

Annabelle Douch Photography

Isabella Jiang Photography

Nicole Kong Photography

Emily Wang Photography

Meghan Salisbury

Giving Visual Language to the Invisible:

The Evolution of my Art Practice between Royal High and the Slade School of Fine Art.

RHS A level

When making portraits at A level, I’d always find that the more I looked the more I saw, to the point that it was overwhelming. I was particularly taken by the indescribable amount of detail crawling all over our skin. My sketchbook pages would often rip having drawn over and over an area, as I tried to integrate all the punctured pores and pools of light that seeped into and over each other. Subsequently, I’d use various types of tape to patch up the rips. The tape created a new language for describing the wrinkles, rashes, sweat and spots on our bodies surface - pencil marks would leave grooves in the tape; watered-down paint would slide into small rings and the art blocks light would glimmer on top of the glossy tape. With its simultaneously repulsive and beautiful qualities, honing in on skin’s details offered me an external expression of the internal body, an idea I will return to at the end of this text…

Trowbridge Art Foundation

During my Art Foundation year at Trowbridge, I took the process of layering that I had begun with embedding tape into my A level paintings and pushed it further. In ‘mixed media painting’ I layered up cardboard, cellophane, newspaper and plaster, binding and squashing them together, tipping plaster on top of its surface and building up paint by applying it in large quantities. The tangled materials were evocative of both a disembodied chunk of flesh and a scaled up section of pulsating skin. Tasks such as “Spend 2 hours seeing how many different types of line you can make with one pen” expanded my understanding of the ways any material, physical or non-physical, could be used. One of my favourite tasks was to see how many different ways you could destroy one of your pieces of art (you can shred it, hide it, spill coffee on it, eat lunch off it, draw another line on it, freeze it…) Working in this organic, exploratory yet structured way made me realise that there are numerous approaches to every task and situation, beyond the conventional ones that have been instilled into us. It was, in part, art’s ability to take me off autopilot that made me want to pursue art making at university.

Slade Undergraduate and New York Studio School Exchange

I undertook a 4 year BA at the Slade School of Fine Art; my practice throughout Slade was multidisciplinary. During Covid I could no longer make large paintings made from messy materials like plaster since I was often working from home. I found myself making animations from photos of pushed and pulled abstracted figures made out of everyday materials like white tack. In animations like ‘Trying to dream into being green’ the white tack’s overstretched, sticky ‘limbs’ performed a dance alongside lyrical poems I wrote. In 3rd year I undertook a semesters exchange to New York, studying at a small painting school called New York Studio School. NYSS’s approach was more traditional than Slade’s - I had life drawing classes every weekday with a range of exercises allowing us to develop, for example, our ability to depict where exactly the models’ body parts were positioned in space. Having been at NYSS, the forms in my work became more explicitly figurative and I learnt to question the ‘formal’ elements of my painting. I now almost exclusively ask myself formal/practical questions during the time that I’m painting, such as: Where is the brightest part of the painting? How do I push that form further back into space? What rhythms are at play in the painting so far?

During one-to-one tutorials with Slade tutors and ‘Crits’ (a weekly group discussion between students and tutors about a body of work exhibited by a student in the Crit space), I realised that my work essentially attempts to overcome the lack of awareness I have regarding what’s happening inside my own body.

By the end of my degree, my paintings were going beneath skin; I dove into creating expressions of my internal body. The following artist statement offers a summary of where I understand my practice to be at currently: Through painting, I create a visual language for the processes and forms people are made up of, but often cannot see or feel.

Since my hands and eyes can’t reach my insides, I make works with ‘scraps’ as a tactile process to provide food for the making of my oil paintings. Often overlooked, flimsy materials, such as newspaper, are shredded, dangled and jammed into and over one another. They feebly cling onto and forcefully cut across each other. In my oil paintings, sinewy, intestinal organisms, repetitive gestural lines, heavy black voids, and moments where a form reaches out of itself into space reoccur. Spongy and brittle forms in snotty green and muscular pink are born; simultaneously they are melded and consumed by the black chasms. They fizz, droop and drool. Bodily forms, movements and spaces both feed off and spawn one another in my work. The paintings flit between provoking associations with a meadow and the inside of an ear, a moonscape and a disease; the viewer is invited to swim through the internal bodies created.

Up, Down, 2024, oil on canvas, 200 x 300cm

Growing Reclining Figures, 2024, oil on canvas, 200 x 200cm