Year 9 pupils were given quite a challenge in their first three Art lessons of the year - to make the boring interesting! The Still Life genre is full of exciting examples of dull objects transformed into vibrant and meaningful art (go to the Tate Gallery website for a bit of context). We decided that animating conventional still life objects would be an interesting place to start. Pupils in 9G and 9H looked at artist Sam Taylor-Wood's seminal re-working of a still life convention, the decaying bowl of fruit, to get ideas for their animations. This film explores ideas about mortality and the fragility of human life. The latin phrase memento mori is used to describe a whole body of such still life art works.
Pupils in 9G and 9H responded brilliantly to this challenge, but don't take my word for it - play the above films and see for yourselves!
R Davies
