Aspiring art teacher and North Albany Senior High School student Neve Schoof has earned the highest ATAR School of Isolated and Distance Education score for year 11 art in WA.
The 17-year-old scored 75 for the ATAR subject she has been completing through SIDE and said she was thrilled to find out about her top score.
“I was excited — I think the actual end score was about 75 or something, and I was like ‘wow, art must be really hard if I’m the highest’,” she said.
Ms Schoof said she experimented with different mediums as part of the course, and said it was a highlight of her art experience for the year.
“I think experimenting and creating projects that I’ve never really done before,” she said.
“I’ve experimented with oil and stuff like that, and creating large scale artworks as well.”
Her project for the year’s first semester was a oil-paint-on-canvas piece that explored the destruction of pollution and growing up alongside it as a child.
“It was this picture of a boy in the foreground, and then in the background it was like destruction and pollution — it was like innocence first and then pollution,” Ms Schoof said.
Her final piece for semester two was an acrylic-on-board in a triptych that explored a young girl’s experience as a migrant.
“It was about immigration and finding your identity even though I’ve never experienced it myself, but I’ve seen other who have experienced that kind of thing,” she said.
“It’s showing how people get displaced from their culture, and then the dragon kind of carries all the way through the triptych.
“And there’s people in the boats on the perilous seas, and the girl is trying to find her identity and she’s got a fence behind her like an asylum seeker.”
She said she was inspired by events on the news and a visit to Christmas Island.
“We went to Christmas Island one holidays, and they have a detention centre there and stories around that and how boats get crashed on the coasts and stuff trying to seek asylum — and that was really inspiring,” Ms Schoof said.
Completing ATAR art through SIDE and in the NASHs art room allowed Ms Schoof to experiment with multiple types of art in support of her final project.
“We did developmental drawings — I think next year we’re going to do a lot more, like leading up and adding to our project,” she said.
“We experimented with a lot of things, so that was when I really got to experiment with different things, and also having this art room as well with all the different materials and stuff, which I haven’t had before.”
Ms Schoof said she was “excited” her hard work paid off and urged others to not stop because of a creative block.
“I feel like sometimes you just get stuck in this creative hole because we have to do all of the other stuff, like math and English and all of that,” she said.
“But art is actually a hard subject and people don’t get that — you really have to think about what people see in your artwork.
“You can’t just make something for the sake of making it — it has to have meaning.”
