Issue link: https://publications.tfs.ca/i/109181
Freedom. Sounds irresistible, doesn't it? Like an endless white beach you can cartwheel down, with no one looking. But what if you were offered 10 beaches? Or 20? Each one different, but as enticing as the rest. Which one would you choose? That is exactly the dilemma Holly P., an IB Diploma candidate, faced when she began her two year journey through IB Higher Art. "I had looked forward to the independence forever," says Holly, now in her final year of the Diploma Program. "You get total creative freedom, you can follow your own path and there are no parameters on how long any one piece can take to complete," she relates. And yet, the very freedom she had waited so long for turned out to be the obstacle to her creative process and achievement: "I had a lot of trouble staying grounded; I wanted to do everything!" Unlike the art courses that precede it, IB Art has students take on only a few units of inquiry, before the teacher sets them off to explore and discover on their own. For Holly and her classmates, those units of study were obsessions and collections, and skin. The idea is for the students to connect these themes, in whatever form they eventually take, personally and deeply to their own lives. Problem-solving through art Holly stuck closely to the unit themes in an effort to stay focused. Through creating art in sequences of photography, abstract painting, chalk drawing and acrylics, she thought she had finally found her 10 TFS - Canada's International School personal theme: How humans relate to each other, themselves, and to the environment. However, her teacher, Vesna Markovic, told her it was too big and all-encompassing, a little like Holly's freedom itself. Holly dug in, mining her theme for the perfect nugget of artistic gold. It struck on human relations and communication. "I want to explore the barriers we create in modern society, the tension in our dialogue and body language, our fear of intimacy – the things we say and don't say," she explains, offering up a quintessentially urban example: "look at the subway: we don't talk to each other, we're afraid to touch each other." This central idea forms Holly's candidate statement, a key requirement of IB Diploma Art. Art and its audience Holly attacked her new theme head-on. Looking back she admits, "I tried too hard. I wanted it to be shocking, to be personally relevant. But it ended up being too literal." Holly realized she was taking her art into too conceptual a realm, one destined to leave her viewers as isolated from her work as the human subjects she depicted in the work itself. "You have to create a dialogue with the viewer. If you can't connect them to your work, your message, it doesn't matter how great your art is – it gets lost," she says.