Tidcombe Primary School celebrated its annual Arts Week with an exhibition that turned the school hall into a dazzling display of student creativity. The week-long event, featuring artwork from every year group, highlighted various imaginative projects that captivated attendees.
The theme was inspired by Mrs Smith’s summer holiday visit to an exhibition called Les Machines de l’Ile in Nantes.
Mrs Smith said: “The Machines de l’Ile is an artistic and a tourist project. It is a blend of the invented worlds of Jules Verne, Leonardo da Vinci’s mechanical universe, and Nantes’s industrial history, on an exceptional site in the former shipyards.”
Year six pupil Holly reflected on the event’s excitement, saying: “What we’ve been doing is since it’s Art Week, we’ve been trying to create stuff which can move, or that’s fun. For example, some people have created items that look like flying in the air and then drew birds. We’ve also seen a living statue, which is quite a big statue in the shape of a human, and it’s actually a robot. It moves and looks so realistic it looks like it’s actually a person. It even waved and moved at people, so we tried to draw it.”
Holly shared how the experience reshaped her view of art: “We’ve learnt that art isn’t just about being competitive, it’s also about having fun and that if you try something new, it can also turn out really amazing. I’ve never done this before, and it turned out to be really fun.”
For Year five pupils like Millie, the week was a chance to delve into the steampunk aesthetic. “We’ve been doing steampunk art and making some scrapbooks about steampunk, and then we’ve made machines and painted them, added some gadgets, and then spray-painted them afterwards. I have no idea what I made; I just put random steampunk things in it. We’ve learnt all about lots of metals and old stuff which doesn’t need electricity to run,” she explained.
Year four students embraced hands-on creativity by crafting cars. Chloe described the process: “On Wednesday, we’ve made our cars. We did the base with lollipop sticks, added wheels, put the top and the sides on, and then put some paint and some paper on it and covered it with black paint. We drew a picture based on The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, and then we got wires and made pictures with them. We had to be very sensible to make sure nobody got hurt while doing it.”
The focus on metals extended to Year three. Sebastian explained his approach:
“We made these items and decorated them with gold paper and stuff like that. I put loads of accessories on mine, like a headband and shoes and such. Our main focus in year three was the metals used to make these characters.”
Classmate Winnie added her perspective on creating metallic effects: “We cut out on cardboard and arranged some string so the string is underneath the foil. Then we put the foil on the top and painted the inside of the string. Most of us painted a background, but I didn’t. We thought it looked like a stained glass window.”