Take Action: What’s in my head?

Step 1.

Share the following artworks with students:

Explain that these artworks are by the Indigenous Australian artist Tony Albert. Tony is interested in using his art to challenge stereotypes of what we understand Aboriginality to be:

"Tony Albert is a politically-minded artist provoked by stereotypical representations of Aboriginal people and the colonial history that attempts to define him, and what Aboriginality is, in the present." (https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/artists/albert-tony/)

Step 2.

Now take a moment to look closely at these artworks and discuss the following with your students:

What do you think the messages are for these artworks?
What do these artworks make you think or wonder about?
What are these artworks made from?
What techniques have been used to create these artworks?

The power of pauses - pauses have been shown to be an effective tool for encouraging students to participate in conversations because they:

• Slow down the interaction
• Provide students with time to think, process, and construct a response
• Allow other students to initiate turns to talk
• Enable teachers to plan their follow-up moves in response to a student’s talk
• Acknowledge and praise their thinking, for example, “I really like the way you thought about...”

For more evidence-based advice on developing oral language in students, click here.

Suggest to students that Tony collects items that he is interested in using in both 3D and 2D collage style artworks and that the items he collects and includes in his artworks contribute to the message of the artwork.

Step 3.

Students will now have a chance to create their own artwork in a similar style to Tony's.

Using magazines and newspapers, invite students to select images and text to cut out and collage onto coloured paper. Encourage students to select images that fit into a theme or a message they are trying to convey to the audience. Ideally, this message will be something that is important or interesting to them, e.g. homelessness, protecting animals from extinction or keeping plastic out of the ocean.

Students should glue down images so they tessellate together and should try to leave a small gap between them (see Tony Albert’s Alien artworks). Students also might choose to collage in the shape of words to further convey meaning to their audience or collage around one larger image (see Tony Albert’s Alien artworks).

A note about perseverance: Sometimes, when we view an accomplished artist's work, we can feel discouraged because our own work doesn’t look the same. You could explain to the students that this artist probably felt the same way when they started out, but they persevered. Perseverance is all about continuing to work hard despite initial disappointment or failure. Students not only need to develop the tenacity to persevere when they don’t initially succeed, they also need to develop a sense of hope that challenges can be overcome. If students are always successful in the first instance, or if everything is given to them by an adult, they will view the first major hurdle in their lives as insurmountable rather than a problem to be solved. Find out more about the benefits of perseverance here.

Extra challenge: Invite students to also stay in a colour theme to create an artwork that blends together well. Not everything you cut out needs to be that colour.

Meaningful Moments: Creating Collage Artwork

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