creativity | The Headteacher's Blog

This week I’ve been proud to see two great examples of our students’ work finding real audiences and connecting with our communities in different ways.

Celebrating Ukrainian Art

Firstly, our students’ art work is on display in an Art Show in Weston-Super-Mare: ‘Ukraine Art Fusion – Artwork celebrating the Artwork of Maria Prymachenko’.

This free collaborative exhibition showcases work from Churchill Academy and Sixth Form alongside a range of other participating schools is being held at the Tropicana in Weston-Super-Mare from 15th-19th May 2024, 10am – 5pm and it is open to the public.

The UK Refugee Resettlement Team invited all schools across North Somerset to participate in an exciting project studying the beautiful artwork of Maria Prymachenko (1909 – 1997), the national artist of Ukraine.

She was a self-taught artist who produced brightly coloured artwork in a folk art style known as Naïve Art, based around themes in nature such as flowers, trees and a range of animals. She explored a wide range of art techniques such as painting, textiles and ceramics. Pablo Picasso visited an exhibition of her work in Paris and said, “I bow down before the artistic miracle of this brilliant Ukrainian.” The Saatchi Gallery in London held an exhibition of her amazing work last year. Maria’s artwork brings happiness, joy and a sense of hope.

At Churchill we have combined students’ work together to make larger art pieces as there was a limit to how many artworks could be submitted. We asked students to make an art work of a flower, leaves or bird in paint, drawing or collage. These separate artworks were then cut out and collaged together on brightly painted boards. We have used birds and flowers that can be seen on the Churchill Academy & Sixth Form campus or in the surrounding areas, and the colours used on the boards represent the Academy’s five houses. We felt these colours linked well to those used by Prymachenko and also helped to tie in our Academy to the project. We hope to display the artworks in a prominent place in the Academy after the art show, along with the students’ artwork we couldn’t fit onto the collages submitted. You can view our collages below – but this is no substitute for heading to the Tropicana to see them for real!

Podcasting about the risks of social media usage

Secondly, our Year 9 students recently completed an interactive media workshop with the North Somerset Violence Reduction Partnership and Collaborate Digital around the risks to young people of their social media usage. Our students made some great podcasts at the time, and one of them has been selected as a finalist to go to the public vote!

The online public vote begins on Friday 17^th May. The winning school will be the one with the most votes a week later and will receive a trophy in recognition of their efforts. Please support our students by voting for their entry in the competition at the Collaborate Digital website!

We are all so proud of our students for expressing themselves so confidently and creatively, in both projects – and connecting with our communities in doing so. Well done to all of those involved!

Creativity – the ability to make something new – is one of the most important skills or qualities we can nurture in our school. It was one of the key words for us when we were thinking about our vision and values last year. We say “we maintain a supportive and inclusive culture that values and celebrates personal enrichment and creativity alongside academic achievement,” and when I walk around the Academy I can see this in evidence everywhere I go.

My office is full of students’ artwork. When I glance up from my emails, or conclude a meeting, or when I walk in from a cold, wet lunch duty, I’m often brought up short by the quality of what they have produced. And it isn’t just the technical skill of the art work that causes this effect: it’s the ideas, the thinking, and the imagination.

You can see it at the entrance to the school too, in the projects that the students have designed which are on display in they foyer. And, yes, in the portrait of me produced by Katie Jackson!

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Walking further into the school, though, this spirit of making, imagining and creating runs through every corridor and classroom. Students are choreographing, planning, deciding, photographing, filming, writing, painting, sewing, sculpting, organising, designing, discovering, inventing, producing, building, performing and making all the time. From the upcycled chairs in the Sixth Form, through the delicious dishes in catering, to the solution to a problem in Mathematics, examples of creativity are everywhere.

Back in 2006, Sir Ken Robinson gave a famous TED talk entitled “Do schools kill creativity?” He talked about the risk that the current education system runs, the risk of squashing the creativity out of children through their experience of the curriculum. He quotes the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso:

picasso

At Churchill, we work really hard to ensure that a student’s experience of school nurtures their creativity. We recognise that the process of learning is creative in itself, as it encourages learners to make new connections and engage, through the process of learning, in the art of creating themselves.