Art Staff accompanied Lower and Upper Six art students on a residential trip to Margate on Friday 24 March. We stayed at the magnificent Walpole Bay Hotel and Museum, originally built before WW1 to host the many holiday makers that made their way to fashionable Margate. The hotel has a magnificent collection of artefacts ranging from Edwardian clothes and changing 20th century fashions to examples of the evolution of the typewriter. The hotel also houses a napery gallery where many artists, including Tracey Emin, have painted and drawn onto Walpole Bay Hotel napkins.
On Saturday we visited the Turner Contemporary Gallery to see the Sonia Boyce exhibition, Boyce won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2022 with the same exhibition. Following the exhibition visit we joined Matthew Swift for a workshop to discover how we interact with the landscape making drawings, taking photos around Margate. On Saturday evening Mr Reed hosted ‘Let’s get Quizzical’ which was a fiercely fought competition with Gabby, Phoebe and Clea romping home to victory. On Sunday the weather was wet and windy so we visited the Margate Caves, an amazing excavation underneath Margate followed by a visit to the contemporary Carl Friedman Gallery. On Monday our trip culminated in a day at the Royal Dockyard in Chatham, where we toured a nuclear submarine and made rope at the only working Victorian Ropery in Europe in a building which is a quarter of a mile long. Our students were great company and came back with lots of drawings, photos and collage work ready to inform further art coursework.
Ms MacMillan, Head of Creative Arts