Creating artwork involves encounters with objects, materials, ideas, cultures and other life forms. This unit will involve visits to Museums, Art Galleries and public artworks to investigate the many forms of collection and archive within a community. Public collections include a range of artefacts that define cultural histories and offer emotional, aesthetic and educational experiences. In contemporary art practice they have become spaces to question and challenge cultural assumptions and offer pathways to reflect and address troubled histories and offer potential for innovation and renewal.

This unit emphasises materiality as an integral aspect of art making and interpretation. Materiality will be explored in studio work with students taken through processes of engaging with different materials and iterations to recognise how informs the meaning of an artwork. Materiality and processes of observation will be used as a lens to interpret works in collections and archives. Critical and formal analysis skills will be developed to assist in learning to see beyond the obvious and the literal. Key instances of artwork and art writing will be explored to deepen an understanding of what a collection reveals about a culture. This unit introduces students to the creative arts emphasis on praxis, where theory is tested and embodied in making and writing.