Careers

To support the Art and Design curriculum, the Department develops opportunities for students to work directly with artists, designers and craftspeople. The experience of working alongside a practitioner at first hand has many benefits: encouraging the pupils’ enthusiasm and interest, introducing new skills, developing creativity and broadening their awareness of employment opportunities within the creative industries in N Ireland and beyond. These visits help connect School to the practices actually used in the work place environment and allow some pupils the opportunity to create pathways from where they are to real careers in our working world. It also allows pupils to see that the thinking skills and personal capabilities that they develop in the classroom, provide everyday solutions in professional practice.

On Monday 17 October 2016, we were delighted to welcome Christina Henri to Friends’ School. Christina is a conceptual artist from Hobart, Tasmania. In recent years she has made it her mission to tell the story of Australia’s female convict women and their children through her memorial, ‘Roses from the Heart’. As honorary artist in residence at the Cascades Female Factory Historic Site from 2003-2015, she has focused on the links between Ireland and Tasmania, Dublin and Hobart, especially highlighting the Grangegorman Female Depot, Dublin, from which many of the women and children came.

In assembly, Christina introduced her work and highlighted the inspirational role that Elizabeth Fry had played in transforming the lives of the women prisoners and their children. Working with pupils in Years 8, 9, 13 and 14, Christina was able to facilitate workshops that gave all those involved a greater understanding of her installation and the concept behind it. In the same way that people from around the world had made and contributed bonnets, symbolising the life of each of the 25,566 women who were transported between1788 and 1853, Christina invited Year 9 pupils to create one each in calico. As she told the story of the lives of these women and their children, the pupils listened to the details of the challenges they faced and recorded their responses as images and messages. These bonnets became the subject of drawing workshops involving our Year 8 and A Level students throughout the day.

At AS and A2 Level our Art and Design students visit the Seacourt Print Workshop in Bangor each year and work alongside printmakers to extend their Intaglio skills.
By offering such events, our pupils are encouraged to extend their artistic skills, develop their creative thinking and become increasingly aware of employment opportunities in the creative industries.

In each classroom, teachers display careers information related to Art and Design and Moving Image Arts. At A Level, teachers contribute through subject reports to the UCAS process and pupils who apply to subject related courses are given support in preparing their portfolios for interview. Past pupils of the Department frequently return to us and pass on their experiences and advice to senior pupils. Megan Graham who is currently studying Textile and Fashion at the University of Ulster, completed a placement with us in the first term this year.