By Ms Copin, Deputy Head (Academic)

One of the things you learn from immersing yourself in modern art is that a dishwasher is not always a dishwasher. In Komar and Melamid’s ‘America’s Most Wanted: Dishwasher size’, the dishwasher is: a measure of length, a gentle parody of the democratic process, and a serious critique of middle-class complacency. It’s also funny. Art, like life, is full of surprises.

Over the course of the last few months, we have been interested in ensuring that our students carry on developing their curiosity about the world, and their ability to engage intelligently with new ideas and points of view. We are also keenly aware of the importance, for young women, of articulating their thoughts in front of an audience. From Miss Gordon’s awesome sessions on public speaking, to Mr Shoults’ Year 7 masterclasses, to initiatives in subject areas, students are given training and opportunities to help develop an authentic and powerful personal voice.

We have added to this provision with another approach: this year, every student in the school has been asked to speak, for a short length of time, on a work of art which they are assigned. Inspired by the nationwide ARTiculation programme, the public speaking initiative which runs annually for over 200 schools, this ran for Years 12 and 13 in the Autumn, is currently underway for Years 10 and 11 as their weekly enrichment activity, and will soon be coming to Years 7 to 9.

The premise is simple. Every student in the school is assigned a work of art by Miss Farmer, our Head of History of Art. These are grouped around themes and periods appropriate to the age group. Year 11, for example, have been allocated contemporary Chinese Art (Ai Wei Wei and others), some Roman works, and the world of portraiture in the 19th century. Complex postmodern practices (and dishwashers!) are reserved for the Sixth Form. Younger years start out with Impressionism, or the Early Renaissance. As a school community, we are slowly but surely building encyclopaedic knowledge of the History of Art from Antiquity to the present day.

Students are reminded of the fundamentals of researching something new (JSTOR not Wikipedia!) and engaging an audience (bullet points, anyone?). All are encouraged to think about their instinctive response to the work they have been assigned. Novels require serious commitment, but the visual world invites an immediate reaction. One of my maths students, yesterday, reflected with surprise on what she had discovered about the Colosseum. I enjoyed the moment last term where a Year 12 student, answering questions after her presentation on Choucair’s sculpture ‘Poem of Nine Verses’, modestly noted she wasn’t an expert on Sufist poetry, before launching into a lucid and comprehensive explanation of how this had influenced the work.

Art expresses deeply-held values, and can encourage reflection on politics, truth, beauty, and what it means to be human. Discussions about art, therefore, are a mechanism for students to reflect on their own beliefs, and articulate these to others. Cultural capital, like physical activity and numeracy, is something all students can benefit from. In this second lockdown, this second period of imposed introspection, looking outwards is healthy, and fun. The sublime and the ridiculous both give us a break from our domestic contexts. And sometimes, in the most unexpected corners of our research, we find ourselves encountering a dishwasher.