🎨 Year 9 Art & Design

Personal investigation, artist research, identity, social commentary, and mixed media experimentation.

Personal Investigation

What Is a Personal Investigation?

  • A personal investigation is an extended project developed from your own interests, ideas, and experiences
  • It is the foundation of GCSE and A-Level Art: demonstrating that you can independently explore a theme or concept through art
  • Unlike a set brief, a personal investigation asks: "What interests YOU? What do you want to say?"

Developing a Theme

  • Start with a broad theme (e.g. identity, memory, environment, power, transformation) and narrow it through research and experimentation
  • Mind mapping: explore all possible directions from a starting word. Don't censor — follow unexpected connections.
  • A strong theme should be: personal (connected to your experience or passion), open enough for multiple interpretations, and capable of sustaining extended investigation
  • Avoid overly literal interpretations — "identity" is richer than "painting a face"

The Four Assessment Objectives (GCSE preview)

  • AO1 — Develop: select, gather, and develop ideas through investigation and research (sketchbook work, mindmaps, artist research)
  • AO2 — Experiment: refine by exploring and developing ideas and selecting appropriate resources, media, techniques (material experiments, test pieces)
  • AO3 — Record: recording ideas, observations, and insights with reference to contextual sources (observational drawings, notes, photographic studies)
  • AO4 — Present: present a personal, informed, and meaningful response (final outcome)

Artist Research Methods

Going Beyond Wikipedia

  • Surface-level research (dates, nationality, movement) is not enough — you need to understand WHY an artist works the way they do
  • Research should inform your own work — ask: "How can I use what this artist does in my own investigation?"

How to Write a Good Artist Study

  • Biographical context: what experiences shaped the artist? Consider: era, culture, personal life, political context
  • Stylistic analysis: how do they use the formal elements (line, tone, colour, texture, shape, form, space, pattern, surface)? What is their technique?
  • Meaning and intention: what are they trying to say? What ideas, emotions, or questions does their work explore?
  • Visual analysis: choose a specific artwork and analyse it in detail using ASCRIB or formal elements
  • Connection to your work: explicitly link the artist to your own investigation — what will you take from them and make your own?

Key Year 9 Artists to Research

  • Cindy Sherman: American photographer who photographs herself in different personas — exploring constructed identity, gender, and the male gaze. Never uses her "real" self.
  • Yinka Shonibare CBE: British-Nigerian artist. Uses Dutch wax fabric (now associated with Africa but originally made for Indonesian market). Explores colonialism, cultural identity, and power.
  • Kara Walker: American artist. Large-scale black silhouettes depicting the antebellum American South — confronting the violence and sexuality of slavery with a deceptively decorative format.
  • Zanele Muholi: South African visual activist. Documents Black queer life in South Africa — challenging invisibility and celebrating a community under threat.
  • Ai Weiwei: Chinese artist and activist. Challenges political power and human rights abuses through large-scale installations ("Remembering" — children's backpacks spelling a message about earthquake victims denied justice).

Identity in Art

What Does "Identity" Mean in Art?

  • Identity is a rich theme because it can explore: cultural background, gender, sexuality, race, class, religion, disability, national identity, and the tension between how we see ourselves and how others see us
  • Art about identity often asks: who gets to tell their own story? Whose representations have dominated art history? Who has been absent?

Self-Portraiture as Identity

  • Self-portraiture has a long history as both self-examination and self-construction — artists choosing how to present themselves
  • Frida Kahlo: used self-portraits to explore pain, gender, Mexican identity, and disability. "I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best."
  • Rembrandt: documented his aging across 90+ self-portraits — one of the most profound explorations of mortal existence in Western art
  • Contemporary photographers like Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin interrogate constructed vs authentic identity

Cultural Identity and Diaspora Art

  • Diaspora: communities living outside their ancestral homelands
  • Artists from diaspora communities often explore the experience of existing between cultures — the hybrid identity, the hyphen (British-Nigerian, Chinese-American)
  • This can involve: mixing visual traditions, exploring appropriation vs appreciation, questioning what "home" means
  • Artists to look at: Chris Ofili, Lubaina Himid, Theaster Gates, Jean-Michel Basquiat

Art as Social Commentary

The History of Protest Art

  • Art has always been used to comment on power, injustice, and society — sometimes at great personal risk
  • Francisco Goya: "The Third of May 1808" — the Spanish painter's harrowing depiction of the French execution of Spanish civilians. Invented the modern "protest painting."
  • Picasso's Guernica (1937): in response to the Nazi bombing of the Basque city. Black and white; fragmented, agonised figures; the bull, the horse, the woman screaming with a dead child. The most powerful anti-war painting of the 20th century.
  • Käthe Kollwitz: German expressionist. Depicted working-class suffering, war, and death in powerful woodcuts and sculptures. Lost her son in WWI; lost her grandson in WWII.

Street Art and Its Legacy

  • Banksy: anonymous British street artist. Uses stencils to create satirical, subversive images in public spaces. Works include: "Girl with Balloon", "Flower Thrower", the "self-destructing" artwork sold at auction
  • Street art is inherently political: it occupies public space without permission, democratising the gallery
  • Debate: is street art vandalism or art? When Banksy's work is painted over, or framed and sold — what does that mean?
  • JR: French artist. Massive-scale photographic installations in public spaces — faces of ordinary people, immigrants, favela residents pasted on walls and rooftops worldwide

Analysing Social Commentary Art

  • Ask: What issue or injustice is the artist responding to? What is the target of the criticism?
  • How does the format, scale, or location of the work amplify its message?
  • Who is the intended audience? How might different audiences respond differently?
  • Does the work propose a solution, or simply bear witness?
  • What is the cost/risk to the artist of making this work? (Ai Weiwei was imprisoned; Banksy remains anonymous to avoid legal consequences)

Mixed Media & Experimentation

What Is Mixed Media?

  • Mixed media: combining two or more media within a single artwork. e.g. acrylic paint + collage + ink + stitching
  • The choice of materials should be intentional — selected for their connotations and how they serve the concept
  • A piece about memory might use: old photographs, tea-stained paper, faded colour, repeated imagery → these choices reinforce the theme of fading memory

Materials and Their Meanings

  • Found objects: materials with pre-existing meaning or history (old letters, fabric from clothes, newspaper). Duchamp's "readymades" established found objects as art.
  • Transparent materials (tracing paper, acetate, muslin): suggest visibility, fragility, layers of meaning, seeing through
  • Collage: combining disparate images and texts — associated with Cubism, Dada, and Pop Art. Challenges the unity of the traditional painting surface.
  • Stitch and textile: traditionally associated with "women's work" — feminist artists reclaim these as serious artistic media. Tracey Emin's embroidered tents; Louise Bourgeois's spider sculptures made from fabric.
  • Photography and digital manipulation: what does it mean to alter a photograph? When does documentation become fiction?

Building an Experimental Mindset

  • The most interesting outcomes often come from "what if?" — "What if I paint on sandpaper? What if I burn the edges? What if I use my non-dominant hand?"
  • Accidents are opportunities: a spilled wash of watercolour, a bleed, a smudge — can these be incorporated and developed?
  • Show your process: art is as much about the journey as the final outcome. Sketchbooks should document thinking, experiments, failures, and development — not just polished work.
  • Iteration: create multiple responses to the same idea. The first version is rarely the best. Variation leads to refinement.