Belmont High School’s 2022 School Captains making their mark on Geelong’s arts cene

Hannah Gorst from Torquay and Arty Foulkes from Jan Juc both graduated as the 2022 Belmont High School School captains.

Both championed one another in their artistic endeavours during school and now, both are on to big things in Victoria’s arts scene.

Gorst and Foulkes will be exhibiting works in Geelong Gallery’s Future Creatives 2023 exhibition, showing now until March 13, making the pair two of the nine 2022 graduates featured in the exhibition.

Gorst and Foulkes went to primary school together, were in the same class for six years of high school, worked together as school captains, and travelled to and from school on the school but each day, which Foulkes said was when they had time to discuss art.

“It was an hour each day we could discuss art and spend time having good chats about art and looking through each other’s portfolios.”

Gorst said because of this, she and Foulkes are both thrilled to share these artistic successes.

“Especially through last year we really encouraged each other with our own art, and now it’s really paid off because we’ve got these amazing results,” Gorst said.

“There’s no competition at all. It’s just really encouraging and inspiring to just see what other people are doing with their art as well and see how you can apply that to your own practise.”

Gorst’s oil on canvas “Newcastle Ocean Baths” was also shortlisted for the NGV 2023 Top Arts exhibition.

Gorst has two works in the Future Creatives exhibition: an oil on canvas painting titled “Newcastle Ocean Baths”, and her oil on paper series “Homelife”.

“The Newcastle painting reflects my personal identity in a way, because we always go up there, every year around Christmas to visit family and I’ve been swimming at those ocean baths for years… so I created a painting to represent that memory and part of my life,” she said.

“‘Homelife” is a series of three colourful oil paintings on paper that depict interior scenes.

“I was inspired by fauvism, which is an art movement of the early 20th century, in which artists favoured bold colours over representational values.

“That’s why in those paintings, they’re just full of colour, unrealistic colour because I didn’t use colour you would usually see.”

This year, Gorst said she plans to continue working on her art and is planning to add more works to her ‘Newcastle Ocean Baths’ series, and perhaps begin studying oil painting.

Foulkes also has two works now showing at the Geelong Gallery Future Creatives exhibition, a mixed medium work titled “Man’s Mirror: the inescapable madness” and a ceramic pot inspired by George Orwell’s novel 1984, titled “An ode to Orwell, after he stole my sanity”.

“The work I have in the Geelong Gallery, ‘Man’s Mirror: the inescapable madness’ is one of my best paintings to date and the one that I’m most proud of,” Foulkes said.

“What I’m sort of discussing there is as modern humans, we exist in this world where we don’t necessarily enjoy everything we see, consumerism, mining, governments, alcohol, drugs, we dislike all these things that surround us, but we can’t exist in the world without them.”

Foulkes’ work will be showing two series in the NGV 2023 Top Arts exhibition: a large colourful ceramic pot titled “a salute to hard work, hair, all thing’s natural and a possible robot apocalypse” and a pair of oxide pots in titled “shoulder to shoulder. Skull to skull” and “cardboard box”.

Foulkes said the work was his summary of human existence on this large ceramic surface.

“Pots often tell a narrative, that’s the history of ceramics, these pots weave a narrative.

“It’s looking at what brought us here, where are were heading… in a very colourful, figurative abstract composition.

“I’m just really stoked to have both opportunities and I think it’s awesome that Geelong Gallery have output on this as well for the smaller regions.”

This year, Foulkes will begin studying painting at VCA.