By Ewen McRae
Staughton College art students have been building their way to success, with a resident artist joining the school recently.
Sculptor Ben Taranto spent a week at the college, working with students from a range of year levels on art pieces and installations to inspire them in the future.
“I introduced them to some new ways of making sculpture,” Taranto said.
“That was assemblage, which is a new way of making structure using whatever you can find, and then we did moulding and casting using plaster and clay to transform an object.
“And we did an introduction to video projection, so using a program to bend video around objects the same way as you would project onto a building, just on a smaller scale.”
Working with grades 8 to 11, Taranto was impressed by the students’ range of ideas.
“They all had a lot of energy and a lot of diversity in interests,” he said.
“All their work was really different, and they took the ideas we introduced and ran with it, especially with the assemblage sculptures.
“We spoke a fair bit about how to turn an idea or a concept into an artwork, and the things they created were really high quality.”
Taranto is working with the school to apply for a grant to spend a term with the school next year.
