Message from the Head of School
Welcome to all students and staff for the commencement of the new academic year at Dunedin School of Art @ Otago Polytechnic. Staff members are delighted to offer a range of successful and new papers, courses and programmes in and across our ten studios: Art History & Theory, Ceramics, Drawing, Electronic Arts, Jewellery & Metalsmithing, Painting, Photography, Printmaking, Sculpture, and Textiles.
These studios have now been reconfigured into four larger sections to maximise critical mass for debate, cross-teaching and learning synergies, protection of small studios, and, most importantly, for academic networking and support.
A suite of postgraduate programmes has finally been approved and this will fill the gap between the current Bachelor of Visual Arts / Bachelor of Fine Arts and the Master of Fine Arts. New students have already been accepted into the new programmes.
Seminars and workshops for students, staff and the public start this week (see below).
At a School-wide meeting this morning, the community which comprises Dunedin School of Art @ Otago Polytechnic took note of key moments in the history of the School, of key values, strategies and characteristics of our particular School within the Otago Polytechnic institution. Hands-on thinking through materials (including words), a sense of being ‘in community’, coming to productive criticality, and a strong work ethic were some of the salient points shared by a group of around 250 students and staff.
Having the new annexe where a large group of people can share the same space contributed to a sense of belonging to the School community and to a shared sense of purpose. No doubt this sense of purpose will come to have widely divergent content for each student, as it has for the various staff members in a School which celebrates difference. Nonetheless, we started the academic year by ‘reading from the same page’ as much as is possible within a heterogeneous group and it felt positive and constructive.
May 2010 be a happy and productive year for every single person within the Dunedin School of Art @ Otago Polytechnic. Let’s continue our tradition of critical engagement with our world through the visual arts.
Prof. Leoni Schmidt
15 February 2010