We are delighted to announce that Christina (8G) and Annabel (8S) have won prizes in the Spirited Arts Competition, entered by our Year 7 Religious Studies students at the end of the last school year. With only 30 prizes awarded and over 65,000 entries (coming from across the UK and overseas), the girls have performed exceptionally well.
Now in its 18th year, the competition challenges students to submit an artistic response to one of five set themes. For 2020, the categories were: Where is God, God’s Good Earth, Holy Words, Inspiring, and Picturing Faith. Students had the freedom to interpret the theme as they wished, whether through painting, poetry or photography.
Here, you can see the two winning OHS entries, along with an accompanying explanation from each girl.
Christina’s entry
The title I chose is God’s View because I believe this is what God sees from the heavenly skies above. There is one thing that many will have in their work, but I don’t, which is colour. The reason I didn’t include colour is because I believe God looked at a world full of simpleness and purity. Doing this work has made me think about what my world is like, my perspective on the world and what my surroundings are like. Since God is not somebody we can physically visit, I‘ve tried to include my thoughts on how God would see his earth by thinking about the events this world has been through. This project has also helped me to realise how diverse our world is and how fascinating this community is.
In my artwork you can see a number of mandalas that signify the universe but I also drew them to signify the never ending and ongoing spirit of life. The way I drew the mandalas was starting with a circle and then adding patterns more and more like a flower blooming. The idea of blooming relates to life and how people grow and learn in life. If you look carefully at the work, you will notice that there is a tear by the eye in the middle of the artwork, I wanted that tear to symbolise that little bit of evilness in the world. I am aware the world right now is not in the best place so I wanted to also show that God was also devastated looking at us going through this time. The waves coming out of his eyes also mean he is showing sympathy for the humans on earth and being angry and heartbroken about how some people are tearing apart the world.
Overall you see patterns invading the artwork but if you rephrase the sentence and change patterns into the word “beauty” it will make more sense. I included some of the main elements of the earth including the oceans, forests and nature, each of these elements blend together and form a beautiful earth like how we people work together in unity and make this world an even better one.
Annabel’s entry
The title I chose for this piece is Earth Watcher. I chose this title because the picture shows somebody crying at the sight of our earth in flames, to represent climate change and how we need to take action. The religion that inspired my piece in Christianity as they encourage people to make small changes in their everyday lives which enable them to live simply and minimise their exploitation of the Earth.
In the top right corner, you will see a quote that states “To get to action, one needs faith, faith results in a convinced heart – a heart that is not proud”― Matthew Sleeth, which is saying that you need faith in the earth before doing anything to help save it. This picture is all about what will happen in the future if nobody takes action, and fast!
The main part of my drawing is clearly the big eye in the centre. I included an eye to symbolize somebody watching the earth slowly disappear whilst doing nothing about it. I was thinking that this picture was set in the future and the person is crying not only because the earth is slowly disappearing but also because they did nothing to help it. Also on my picture, the eye’s iris is made up of many puzzle pieces all coming together to create the full earth – this is to represent people coming together to fix what we have damaged. Also on the iris there is a couple of black and white puzzle pieces – this is to represent that even if we fix the earth we cannot get rid of the damage already done, but we can try. When I was drawing the piece I was really thinking and realising how every piece of paper used slowly cracks another piece of our earth away, and the more paper we buy and the more plastic we use the more it chips away at our earth, and if we don’t do anything about it we will run out of chances and it will no longer be our earth or a planet at all.
Congratulations Christina and Annabel – your entries are both aesthetically beautiful and thoughtful, and wonderful interpretations of your chosen themes.