Artist Statement With our 2019-2020 school year coming to a close it’s time to reflect on this past year. Animas High School has presented me with a lot of new concepts such as project based learning, and a smaller learning environment. Making the transition to Animas all the easier was my highly enthusiastic and supportive teachers. My TPOL required me to reflect on various aspects of what we’ve done this year, and I figured an essay would be a great way to cover the three prompts given.
First off was one highly important change I have made as a learner this year. I chose to present myself with becoming a better project-based learner. I have always enjoyed school projects, and coming to Animas presented me with a lot more room to work with that interest. A great example of Project Based learning would have to be the Climate Change project presented in Biology class. This project presented me with a lot of new concepts that I wasn’t used to, one of the big things being going outside of school in order to get parts of the project finished. This wasn’t the usual “do things at home,” rather it involved going out into the community during school hours in order to work on the project. My group and I set up dates to go interview students at St. Columba about Climate Change. We always checked with the teachers to make sure that we weren’t disturbing lessons by doing so. I knew I was on the right track. Being presented with these new ideas caused me to think critically about how the project should be laid out, and how to accomplish what we needed in a reasonable time. Next we address what work we are most proud of. My proudest work would have to be the Doodle For Google project in Digital Arts. Despite a wee bit of procrastination, I think that I pulled the final product off well. This project was one of our biggest in Digital Arts. The prompt was, “How do we show kindness?” Everyone else was getting far ahead of me, while I was still stuck with just the Google lettering on my screen. One day I pulled apart one of the o’s, and I noticed it all looked like raindrops. From there, I managed to make the double o’s into two people standing under and umbrella in the rain. Act 1 of kindness. Then I made the big G into a diving board of a pool, with people cheering on an individual. Act 2 of kindness. The small g became rock climbers helping each other. Act 3 of kindness. Finally, the l became a 1, and the e became a 2, with two people shaking hands. Act 4 of kindness. I was shocked at how I could muster all those ideas so quickly into one thing. All of that came together within the space of 2-3 days, and it definitely stood out. Despite running with nothing for a while, I still managed to pull off a piece that I was (and still am) very proud of. Finally, we look at Habits of Heart and Mind. Those skills have really helped me out during this first year at AHS, mainly through advocacy, and perseverance. Recently, I managed to end up a month behind in Humanities class. I didn’t tell a soul, thinking this would just breeze past me and nothing would happen. However, I finally felt so stressed and so concerned that I told my parents. We settled to remove video games until I was caught up. I advocated to them and to Stephen about what I was currently doing, to keep them updated. I sent emails out, and talked with my parents whenever I completed a chunk of the assignment. I persevered and stuck with it, despite being weeks late to the project. However, as time progressed, and I got interrupted by TPOL, I was unable to finish the assignment. Even with that said, perseverance and advocacy are highly important things, and they helped me to (almost) get out of a hundred-foot deep hole. If I hadn’t advocated for myself, nor persevered, I wouldn’t have reached the point that I did, or at least tried to reach. So, how does all of this tie in with my visual art piece? I initially knew that I wanted to do a collage, but not necessarily the same-old, same-old collage concept everyone is familiar with. I started by saying, “Hey, why don’t I have the collage consist of my three projects discussed?” I shared ideas with my cohort teacher, and with my parents, and I finally came up with a solid idea to go with the collage; Represent stress on assignments via grey coloring, with the highlights or good parts being done in green. To keep things interesting, instead of just staring at some images with green and grey as the only color scheme, I decided to have all the blank space filled in with vibrant colors, and also leave small notes and doodles. The notes and doodles were to highlight specific areas, or explain what happened at a given point, while the vibrant colors essentially represent the majority of the school year itself -- all good. First year Animas has been quite the trip. New concepts, new ways of learning, new ways of finding growth from our mistakes, and accepting our mistakes for what they were, or what they currently are. Meeting all these new people within such a small environment is a treat; you get to know everyone better in such a short time, and teacher feedback is plentiful. Can’t wait to come back next year! |