NPP 18: The French Art Exhibition itself

 It has occured to me that after 17 posts on our National Priorities Project, I haven't really outlined our Year 7 French Art Exhibition in any detail.

It is hosted every year in a local Windmill which is a community exhibition space. We don't have to pay for the space, but visitors (except the Year 7 exhibitors themselves) pay a small entrance fee as would any visitor to the Windmill. Before exhibiting at the Windmill, we previously held the Exhibition in school and one year (before Brexit) the work travelled to a partner school in France. Some years we hold a vernissage early evening event with nibbles and fizzy cordial to open the Exhibition and invite carers and parents and the local press.

The work is on display for a month in the spring, before being taken down. Some of the artwork is given back to the pupils and some is kept for things like Open Evenings. As it's a Windmill it has steep stairs to several floors, so we also make a video of the work to be shown on a screen on the ground floor for any visitors who can't access the upper floors. I think it's safe to say that most of the visitors are carers and family members of the pupils, although visiting Windmill aficionados also get to see some nice French.

Every pupils' work is displayed and there is a variety in the quality of the artwork and of the French. We hope that the fact that it is going on display challenges the pupils to take responsibility for producing their best work. Mounted on colourful paper, it has a naive charm and is always a great success.

There isn't a theme for the topic of the artwork, although it's best if it's a picture with several items, so that there's enough to talk about in the description. Some pupils complete the artwork in French lessons and some complete it at home. This may include painted canvases and objet d'arts. But most are A4 and in coloured pencil.

The description in French is attached as a card below the painting. It contains details of things in the picture, their relative positions, the colours, what people and creatures are doing, and some comments on the style or how it makes you feel. Pupils also write a fictional biography of themselves as an artist, modelled on examples of real artists in the booklet. They adopt a nom de plume and can claim to have travelled, worked and studied across the world. Bearing in mind that the work is to be displayed publicly, they don't use their real names. But it is important they put their name on the back of the card and the back of the picture, unless you want to play a very big game of match the picture to the description when it comes to mounting them on the coloured paper. Sometimes the name written on the back can also give an indication of which way up the picture is supposed to go, if there is any doubt. I will talk in another post about the language content of the unit and the resources.

Talking of "match the French to the description", this is in fact what many of the visitors do. Parents and carers are put on the spot to read the pupils' French, and the picture can be quite handy in giving clues. It's nice for pupils to hear their parents showing off their French. And generally the public are very impressed with the pupils' work. I have written here about the accuracy of pupils' work.

A couple of top tips I have picked up from the school's art department in case you like the sound of this as a project for your pupils... Once the pupils have selected the items (and the vocabulary) that are going to go in their picture, I make them sketch it in a very very small rectangle. The items need to fill the canvas and be bursting out. They shouldn't just plonk things in the middle, but should think about whether something is very close, or only partially fits in the picture, or is behind something else. Things like bridges or rainbows divide up the picture and fill up the background. Because the second tip is that there should be no white space. It's not a picture of some things. It's an artwork, and every inch of the paper is used. And the third tip is when you staple the work (on big sheets of coloured paper) to the display boards, tilt the stapler so that only one of its little metal feet goes into the board properly. That way when you take the exhibition down, pinchnose pliers can quickly and easily pull out the staple.

I plan to use a future post to look at the language learning content and our resources - but you can get an idea already if you have a good look at the examples above. The idea is that it makes a different start to Year 7 that isn't repeating what pupils have done in Primary School, and which shows them that they can already be creative with their French and use it for an audience.