Milton Keynes ARTiculation

On the 2nd of February, we went on a trip to the Milton Keynes Museum where we attended an ARTiculation competition heat. The competition invites young people from all over the country to give eight to ten minute long speeches on a piece of art that means something to them. In this next stage of the competition the students had to give speeches to many more people and were competing against one another to go on to a further round. We saw eight speeches over the course of the day, all with unique and insightful topics that challenged and entertained the whole audience. Samuel Brown (Yr13), represented Challoner's and gave an impressive talk on ‘Disintegrating X: Lamborghini Miura’ by Fabian Oefner. He unpicked the story behind the Miura and the dynamic photography project that it inspired. He was confident, clear, seemed to enjoy doing his speech and proved himself to be a strong speaker and truly passionate about the piece he chose.

Before we got to see the speakers give their talks, we had a tour of the gallery's exhibition on Dame Laura Knight, a phenomenal female impressionist artist who lived from 1877 until 1970. She was the first commissioned female war artist and first female artist invited to join the Royal Academy since the eighteenth century. We were able to see a range of her works in oil and watercolour, particularly focusing on portraiture of women in many different environments ranging from ballet dancers, circus performers and war workers during the second world war. It was intriguing to see her detailed impressions of people and the way in which she accurately captured scenes through art. It was especially inspiring to see a successful female artist overcome the patriarchy of her time in her artistic career. The tour was overall very interesting and introduced us to an inspiring new artist, making the ARTiculation trip even more worthwhile.

By the end of the day we had discovered an incredible artist in Dame Laura Knight and were given a range of new perspectives and opinions of completely new artists through the talks. Not only is it great inspiration for our A level projects at the moment but hopefully we can try to reach the same level next year with our own speeches.