Year 5 Digital Animation - Mitcham Primary School

Year 5 students from Mitcham Primary School undertook a unit of work on Abstract Art in response to Chiharu Shiota's work Absence Embodied and Olafur Eliasson's work Dark matter collective on display at the Art Gallery of South Australia, culminating in the creation of their own abstract Digital Art, or Generative Art. 

An incursion with local Digital Artist, David Doull, considered different types and eras of abstract art using a range of mediums, from paintings by Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky, to sculptures by Marcel Duchamp, and to digital/light based art from Refik Anadol, Ryoji Ikeda, and Shohei Fujimoto. Students were prompted to consider “what is art?” and “who decides?”, and were encouraged to think as “an Artist” in creating their work.

Students then learnt to create their own abstract digital art using block coding with an app called Endless Art. Their generative art-making with this medium allowed them to form a range of unique abstract patterns and images with a digital system to combine glyphs, pixels and shapes.

Connecting back to Absence Embodied and Dark matter collective allowed students to consider art-making with virtual simulations of materials using digital tools – like using digital strands of wool and geometric pattern making with light. Using the digital tool, students created artworks that were the product of ideas they had developed through experimentation and planning, made choices about how to use visual art conventions, and used a range of digital block coding and techniques that best communicated their intentions.

Students also reflected on their own abstract art in the context of the two AGSA works that we had viewed, selected a piece of their own for display, and wrote an artist’s statement to inform audiences about themselves as the artist and their intentions. Pieces were then displayed in a gallery for members of the school community to view the students’ curated art.

Miriam Doull

Tash Lawson-Forbes

Anthony Bryce 

Mike Fidge

Year 5 Teachers | Mitcham Primary School