Year 13 Art student, Ed, reports: 

“For the Art students, this trip was an opportunity to gain inspiration for our projects. At the start of the day, everyone was eager to get there and start gathering primary research. At The Victoria and Albert Museum we had an hour to walk around and complete sketches of some of the art work, we mostly stayed around the sculptures containing figures but there were lots of other displays and exhibitions to visit, with the gallery split into different cultural art such as art from Japan and China. 

After our time was up we travelled to the White Cube Gallery, most people found that it was a great opportunity to do drawings whilst travelling between our destinations, especially on the train and the tube, as well as of surrounding architecture around London. With the Year 12’s looking at perspectives of buildings, walking through London’s streets gave them a vast number of buildings to draw, using the skills they had previously learned the week before in lessons.

The White Cube Gallery was displaying works by the artist Anselm Kiefer, who had produced a diverse body of work comprising painting, sculpture and installation. Kiefer's work was huge scale landscapes and he used a variety of media such as tra branches and axes, I found that everyone was trying to perceive his work differently, with some looking to copy it accurately, and others, looking to reinterpret some of his mark-making. At the end of this trip everyone came out with a huge amount of primary research and I feel it was a very beneficial trip for all the students there.”

Year 13 Photography student, Cleo, reports:

“On Thursday 21st November, my school and I visited the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Natural History Museum in London. When entering the V&A, the first thing I saw was the green and blue glass sculpture hanging from the ceiling. My friend and I visited the photography exhibition, right at the entrance there was a collection of photographs by Valérie Belin. The collection on show was called ‘Reflection’. I liked her images because they reminded me of what I am intending to do next in my photography project. I also walked around the textiles and mixed media area, finding lots of interesting pieces. 

After this, we went to the Tim Walker exhibition. This exhibition was very weird and wacky. There were lots of bright colours in the exhibition, even the black and white images were very bright and vibrant. The bright colours in the images linked nicely to my project, it helped me to see what colours worked well together in images with different colour backgrounds.

Overall the trip to the V&A was very useful in helping me to further my knowledge and inspiration for my project and I now have lots of ideas for what to create next.