Thinking Allowed
As you drive or walk down Forbes Street towards SCEGGS, you may have noticed a historic building opposite the school crossing. Once known as St Peter’s Rectory, and then part of the SCEGGS Junior School from 1937 to 1941, it is now a private residence.
On the western side of this building is a beautiful example of decorative brickwork, rows of white “x” shapes that always remind me of the St Andrew’s Cross spider (Argiope keyserlingi) as it waits in its web for prey. This in turn prompts me to think of the remarkable manipulation of the brickwork in the Frank Gehry UTS Business School. The external form of the building implies a fluid, undulating surface which defies the hard brittle material from which it is made. Both buildings reveal the creative intersection of art and science, so central to architecture. These buildings also remind me that both Gehry and the builder of the St Peter’s Rectory thought about how these visual embellishments would engage those who may directly or inadvertently interact with them. Both embed a visual element in an otherwise purely functional wall. Gehry would no doubt have been aware of the notoriety and spectacle of his design. But the simplicity of the crosses on the St Peter’s Rectory are to me more poignant. The gentle visual gesture in the brickwork turns something prosaic into something sublime.
It is vitally important that we cultivate in ourselves and our students a capacity for seeing the world more deeply and diversely – awakening an interest and opening our minds to new ways of interpreting things. The environments we move through each day are packed with visual cues, codes, signs, and symbols, clamouring for attention. Sometimes the visual language is modest, like the brickwork on the Rectory wall, at other times it is confronting or stealthy, like advertisements that prompt us to act or buy things on the strength of their superficial appeal.
It is often assumed that spoken or written language is, and always will be, the ultimate form of communication. Yet visual language is equally powerful and has been so from Palaeolithic times to the present. A handprint on a cave wall is the first logo, the signature of a person who wanted to make his or her mark.
In our art classrooms at SCEGGS, students are taught to slow down and ponder, to contemplate and interrogate what they see through close observation and analysis. As young artists, our students explore the profoundly imperative experience of creative endeavour. Through their study of art, they are empowered to convey or register emotion and feeling, to find a way to express things that often cannot be conveyed or depicted in written or verbal ways. Art enables them to process and give form to their interior ideas and allows them to experiment with and consider different points of view.
Alongside the great reward of making art, we teach our students through emphasising close observation and analysis to make informed judgment about what they see. It seems more urgent than ever that we teach students how to decode images in order to understand and manage the intentions of a culture that is distended by visual material. Becoming fluent in the language of images gives our students an advantage at school, in their future workplaces and in negotiating environments that are inundated with visual information. Educating students to understand their own viewing process is crucial and in Visual Arts we respond by teaching our students the difference between “looking” and “seeing.”
The skill of visual literacy continues to grow in significance. 40 years ago, the art critic Robert Hughes, referred to the ubiquity of visual culture, then defined by television and late 20th century streetscapes congested with signage and advertising as “a forest of media”. How quaint a description this seems now! In the Internet Age, consuming, absorbing and decoding a seemingly limitless torrent of visual information has gained a new urgency.
The visual world today is no longer a simple “forest of media”. It often can feel that we cannot see the wood for the trees. Visual literacy is now more than ever a key competency that young people should be considering a crucial part of their skillset. Our children are unintentional or deliberate consumers of visual information on an unprecedented scale. Today it is estimated that the average person encounters between 6,000 to 10,000 visual cues every single day.
600 years ago, Europeans were considered literate if they could spell their names– and 80% could not. Then came the Gutenberg printing press. Within a century the number of people who could read and write grew exponentially, and the literate were able to express and share complex ideas in writing. Mass literacy fostered progress in science, general education, and the arts. We are now moving into a period of mass imagery.
According to a report released in May last year, 1.8 billion photos are uploaded every single day. On Instagram alone, 20 billion photos have been uploaded since 2010. The Internet has totally transformed the way images convey communication.
And it is indisputable that we love looking at visual images. Can we imagine art galleries empty of their collections or our houses without architectural or design or aesthetic considerations? Imagine if we had no imagery elsewhere, where it is subliminal and taken for granted, social media, the labels on packaging, theatre, music videos, fashion, books, films, branding, airports, street signs… Our brains are designed to perceive the world visually and we thrive on persistent visual input. Often, visual imagery speaks in a deliberately and inherently seductive language.
Science tells us that we devote more of our brain’s processing power to vision than to any other sense or ability. Seeing consumes a surprising 50% of our brain’s resources. It’s so vital, therefore, to teach our students how to think about what they see.
“Nearly 30% of the brain’s cortex is devoted to visual processing,” Brian Kennedy the Director of the Toledo Museum of Art says. “More than the other human senses. The optic nerve has over a million nerve fibres. Ninety percent of all the information we take in from the world we take in visually. With so much of the brain’s cortex devoted to visual processing, it is logical that visual literacy is the key sensory literacy.”
Classical and medieval theories of memory and learning placed a significant emphasis on how the visual presentation of words and lines affected the sequencing of information in the mind. Research reveals that visual literacy improves critical thinking, overall educational accomplishment, empathy towards others, and ability to decipher technology. It also helps when living in an environment drenched in visual material.
Visual literacy is a term that educators have been working with since 1969. A lot of the research speculates that it’s only a matter of time before more universities have visual literacy programs and there are already some fascinating interdisciplinary courses being designed such as at the Harvard Medical School where specialised art programs have been designed to enhance physical examination skills among medical students. One method of enhancing inspection skills is teaching “visual literacy,” the ability to reason physiology and pathophysiology from careful and unbiased observation. The outcomes of the test stated, “Formal art observation training improves medical students’ visual diagnostic skills”.
At the University of Queensland, visual thinking strategies are being used as an educational tool that uses art to teach thinking, communication skills and visual literacy to people from a range of backgrounds and disciplines. The outcomes of the program reveal that through “visual thinking strategies students learn to carefully observe, evaluate, synthesise, justify and speculate – all essential aspects for critical thinking. It has been measured as an effective tool to build visual thinking skills, which directly benefits graduate performance, including exam results.” UQ has shared this program with disciplines such as Biomedical Sciences, Veterinary Sciences, Medicine, Engineering, Nursing, Midwifery, Art History, Education, and Business and it is growing in demand.
I love that you can learn so much through being a visual learner and developing your visual literacy. My curiosity about the brickwork in the St Peter’s Rectory led me to exchanges about the history of the building with the School Archivist Prue Heath, prompted me to consider other links with other buildings and architects, led me to learn the proper scientific name of the spider the shapes reminded me of, that the bricks – approximately 320,000 in total – in the UTS Business school were custom made for the building and laid by hand using corbelling, the same technique used to build the entrance to the Lion’s Gate at Mycenae, and so on! Being visual literate opens up the world to an endless sequence of discoveries.
And it also equips our children with the necessary skill to filter and decode the times we are living in. Despite art’s proven transformative and impactful influence, and its capacity to enrich and create more sophisticated cultural environments, it can appear sometimes that creative subjects like ours are perceived as ‘soft’, a waste of time, and that experiences in these subjects or university degrees will almost certainly not lead to employment after graduation. We can forget that without subjects such as Visual Arts we immediately close our minds to the delicate and deeply important human world of creative endeavour and that the skills learned in a study of art: creativity, ingenuity, planning, innovation, observation, and moving beyond “looking” at images to fully “seeing” them is now more than ever essential.
Heidi Jackson
Head of Visual Arts
