Review: Brilliant and expressive - students do school proud

How different then from Leamington’s Trinity School (and from the other schools in the area, I’m sure), where the staff have clearly devoted themselves to the sometimes quite difficult task of getting their sixth formers to express themselves without reaching for the Goth horror clichés beloved of sixth formers. The theme the staff set for the exhibition was calculated to avoid such traps and stimulate the imagination instead.

Last year’s students got their teeth into ‘Cold Dark Matter’, but this year it was ‘Air Earth Fire and Water’. Elemental stuff that resulted last year in an impressive collaborative wood relief that still sits defiantly on the wall, challenging this year’s art and photography students to go one step further. Or straight up in the air in the case of Gabrielle Colvert’s fluffy cotton wool clouds that surround a silver chandelier as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Not quite fitting the brief but soaring anyway is Jack Bale’s or possibly (zero marks for labelling) Jane Bale’s manikin whose upper body convincingly morphs into a wooden house. It’s a brilliantly mad brainwave of an idea that Dali would have loved, though he would not have been quite so appreciative of Jack Newitt’s photo portraits of his family - not crazy enough - but they are particularly appealing as a set of images, not for any sentimental reasons but for their level of technical skill. It’s a beautiful ensemble of images with brilliantly inventive familial cross references.

These are just a few examples, but there’s lots more quality work. Maisy Day’s map of Leamington made into a tiny dress. Brilliant. So, congratulations class, you’ve done your school proud.

Peter McCarthy