With its stunning coastal scenery and rich artistic heritage, St Ives served as the perfect backdrop for pupils to immerse themselves in workshops, gallery tours, and hands-on creative experiences.
After a long travel day, we arrived at sunny St Ives at around 4PM. We headed into the hostel, Cohort. After settling into our rooms, we walked down through the lovely town to the sea. The waves were very big, so we took the opportunity to sit on benches and draw the scenery with our materials we were given prior. We then had a nice yet windy walk down the side of the beach and walked back up through the town to our hostel for dinner. We had pizza while watching the thrilling House singing live on YouTube. This was very fun, and we all enjoyed it massively.
The next day was an early one, we woke up at 6ish and got ready for our first workshop which was a twilight beach photoshoot with Chris Webber. This is when we got cameras to capture the gorgeous Cornwall sunrise on the beach. The weather was lovely with little to no clouds that morning. We learnt how to use our digital SLR cameras as well as our phone cameras to take long exposure photos.
Thank you to all the art teachers for this amazing experience. We will remember it for a long time to come.
We still had much of the morning remaining when we had another workshop on the beach. This time with local artist Greg Humphries, which was painting en plein air. This was fun because we got taught techniques that we will use in our GCSEs and beyond! After this we went to go buy some lunch in the town, and then went to the famous Kirt Jackson Foundation Gallery. This was interesting because we got taught all about his expeditions happening at that time and how he makes all his work outside in nature, not from looking at a phone screen or photograph. After this we had time to work in our sketchbooks, sketching and looking at all the photographs we had taken that day. We were made a very nice dinner that night and ate as a group in the common room. This was very nice.
The following day was a fun, full-packed day of art! We started the day off with a tour of the Tate Gallery and did a workshop whilst looking at a lot of different paintings and drawings in the collection. This focused on the famous St Ives artists and we found out what techniques they used and why they painted them. After lunch we made our way to the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Garden. This made us very curious because the museum was left the same as when she sadly passed away in a fire in the exact house. This made us interpret the place differently from what we thought we might have, knowing that she had been making the sculptures here when she died years ago. We got taught a lot about the different perspectives and processes of making sculptures from the positive space and negative space and the different properties of materials. That evening, we all went to a local fish and chip shop for dinner. Every night we sat together in the common room, talking about the day, reviewing the work that we did throughout the day and working on individual pieces.
The last full day flew by so quickly. We started by driving through foggy hillsides to get to the Geevor Mine. Here we were shown around the machinery of the mine that they used and then had a workshop on mono printing with the artist Oliver West. We went off around the site and printed different pictures of the mining location.
We also took photographs that we could use in our sketchbooks. In the afternoon, we made our way to the Tremenheere Sculpture Garden for lunch and a walk around. We stayed at the garden all afternoon and spent time drawing, looking at the art works and taking lots of photos. A highlight was seeing the work of James Turell called ‘Tewlwolow Kernow’ which was a sculpture that you could sit in and experience. That evening, we reviewed our work one last time. We woke up bright and early on the last day to get on the road back to Charterhouse.
Thank you to all the art teachers for this amazing experience. We will remember it for a long time to come.
Jess, Year 10
