On Monday 20 February, contemporary sculptural wire and ceramic artist, James Ort, returned to the College to host an all-day wire workshop in the Art Department with all Year 10 students studying GCSE art.
Below is a writeup of the day from Year 10 pupil, Evan Greenway:
'Last week, James Ort, a master of wire and sculpture, came to visit the Year 10 art pupils. We started the day with a brief, yet still impressive show of the work from past workshops. These wire sculptures really inspired us, but we were all a bit daunted by the idea of creating an animal from just wire and zip ties.
James then sent us off and we were on our own. At first it was slow to make progress, but quickly I could see bodies of animals popping up all around the department – Theo Stalder's in particular, who tackled a bigger scale for his swan animal. We learned an abundance of interesting skills to help our animals take shape and this was a very helpful and inspiring workshop which I'm sure sparked interests in my fellow art students. Thanks James!’
Speaking after the workshop, Head of Art Miss Jiggens said:
‘We were delighted to have James Ort host an all-day workshop in the Art Department for all Year 10 students studying GCSE art. This is the fourth time James has visited Shiplake and we were really pleased to have him back. He always inspires the students to work with new materials and it was a fantastic opportunity for the students to enrich their coursework by working three-dimensionally for the whole day with a renowned artist and creating their own wire animal or insect sculpture.
When he came last year, James inspired several pupils to then choose wire as their final outcome for their coursework project. M Li in Year 11 created a human-sized dragon, inspired by the smaller wire dragon he made with James last year.
All of the pupils were fantastic and worked really hard all day. Wire is not an easy material to use, but they all stepped up to the challenge. A big thank you to James Ort for coming back to Shiplake and please come back again next year!’
