2 October 2025
Miss Siobhan Campbell, Head of Art
Heat press workshop
On Tuesday 30 September, our Upper Sixth Fine Art and Textiles students had the exciting opportunity to take part in a heat press workshop with artist Sally Pharo. Sally, who achieved a First in her honours degree at Central Saint Martins, shared her expertise and guided students through a wide range of innovative printmaking techniques.
The workshop began with the fundamentals, as students learned to print their own images using ink. From there, they quickly moved into more experimental territory, incorporating natural stencils made from leaves and flowers to achieve striking and unexpected effects. They also created bespoke inked backgrounds onto which they layered their images to produce atmospheric and dreamlike compositions.
As the day progressed, students explored their own imagery to push the range of experimentation within their coursework projects. This gave them the chance to test out ideas for layering and composition that will feed directly into future pieces, adding depth and originality to their personal work.
The workshop proved both technically enriching and creatively inspiring, and we are very excited to see how students’ newly acquired skills continue to evolve across their portfolios in the months ahead.
Gallery visits
The following day our art scholars enjoyed an inspiring trip to London galleries, which began with the much-anticipated Kiefer/Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. Students were soon immersed in the ambitious scale and intricate mark-making of these two great landscape artists and inspired to produce a series of beautiful transcriptions, deepening their understanding of the artists’ approaches and techniques.
The day continued with a visit to the Halcyon Galleries, where we were treated to an impromptu talk on a David Hockney digital landscape and a renowned Andy Warhol work currently on sale. This gave our scholars a unique opportunity to see how different generations of artists have approached themes of scale, technology, and popular culture.
Perhaps the highlight of the trip came as we crossed to the second Halcyon gallery and had the great fortune of meeting contemporary British artist Dominic Harris, whose work was on display. Dominic generously took time to speak to our scholars about his practice of using technology to construct highly personal interpretations of natural phenomena. He combines a reverence for nature with a fascination for code, offering a surreal and whimsical take on reality.
This was a truly enriching day for our scholars, who left with a renewed sense of excitement for their own creative journeys.