> Heideveld High workshop page

Heideveld High workshop page

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Heideveld High School at work

The learners visited art exhibitions at the Iziko South African National Gallery to engage with and explore the way artists use imagery and styles to create visual representations of their concepts or stories. Learners focused on the work of modernists like Cecil Skotnes, Azaria Mbata and the Rorkes Drift artists who were heavily influenced by religious stories, traditional beliefs, South African history and culture and human rights. These artists were actively engaged in the social welfare and education of others. They used ‘intaglio’techniques –incised images- as a method of producing art- resulting in a linear style that could be associated with rock engravings, reliefs, woodcuts and carvings and ,of course – linocuts, an art form introduced to South Africans by Europeans, but appropriated and developed into a very successful and instantly recognizable art genre by local artists. We focussed on line, shape,pattern and rhythm to give our artwork the look and feel of these linoprints.

Heideveld High is situated about 15 minutes from Cape Town in a suburb called Heideveld which forms part of an area called Athlone .The school can be seen from the N2(one of our national roads) .Adjacent to the school is a railway line and on the other side is a township called Gugulethu.Our school is very cosmopolitan as our learners are from many different cultures.English ,Afrikaans and isiXhosa are the main languages spoken.

Your River

Theme: River Culture> Communication

Context:

The Liesbeeck, once the primary source of fresh water in Cape Town, has since pre-colonial days attracted the settlement of various groups and sustained the lives and practices of many different people. While the relationships within and between these communities were/are often antagonistic or strained due to colonialism, slavery, apartheid and their legacies- cultural and social practices of the local population have to a large extent been fused and appropriated, and given a particular Cape Town ‘flavour’.

The lush land surrounding the river has since 1659 been seized by European settlers and practitioners of Apartheid- starting with the Dutch administration who erected a series of fortified fences along the Liesbeeck River and a wild almond hedge in present day Kirstenbosch to separate the Khoi-Khoi from their ancestral land and from the Dutch. The Group Areas Act of 1950 saw the land alongside the river reserved for whites and vast amounts of people were forcibly removed to barren outlying areas of Cape Town.

This displacement of entire communities to ‘ghettos’ and the segregation and racial classification of its members have created a great sense of distance and discrepancy between Capetonians, who have been conditioned to view the ‘otherness’ in their neighbours. Yet so many common practices and beliefs exist…

Learners combined all their knowledge, experiences, ideas, research and images to create a collaborative artwork, which would be representative of cross cultural pollination and social practices of those who once lived alongside the Liesbeeck River and the contexts in which they view their own lifestyles.

The resulting artwork focuses on the need for people to communicate and share cultural knowledge and practices in order to reach and sustain peaceful coexistence by forging respect and dispelling cultural ignorance and myths.

Exhibition

Our artwork

We divided our final composition into 27 blocks, and individual learners further trandserred and interpreted these smaller designs to create one BIG collaborative artwork.

Participants

ROTW team