HSC Visual Arts Exhibition

It has become something of a stylistic ‘thing’ of mine to launch into my summary essay on the HSC Exhibition with a quotation. Why? Because often, when reading (or rereading) works of literature isn’t there often a line, a phrase or sentence that resonates, unexpectedly? My habit is to commit those words to a notebook, or mark an asterisk in the margin, to easily return to it again and again, often drawing unexpected comfort from the relatability to writers I do not know, or who are long gone.

This year, it is the words of the painter Jack B. Yeats (1871–1957), younger brother of the poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), that have stayed with me. Yeats believed profoundly in the capacity of art to transform experience into something enduring. The artist, he suggests, is impelled by a desire to “pass on the moment to his fellows, and to those that come after him”: to take an experience, an observation or a memory and give it form, so that it might be encountered by another.

It is an idea that connects deeply with the 2026 HSC Visual Arts Exhibition. Bringing together the work of twenty-three candidates, the exhibition presents a remarkable diversity of ideas, materials and approaches, as each young artist has sought to develop an individual visual language through which to make sense of life. Using the mediums of painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography, printmaking, digital and photomedia practices, the boys have not simply produced works for examination; they have recorded something of their intellectual curiosity, their experiences and their developing understanding of what it means to look closely at the world.

Each body of work is, in some sense, an assembly of moments: things seen, experienced, remembered, questioned and imagined. What the boys have made is therefore more than a collection of resolved objects. Their works hold something of the lives, interests and ways of seeing of their makers at a particular moment in time and, in doing so, allow that moment to endure. The exhibition is both an achievement and an act of communication: twenty-three individual perspectives offered to an audience, inviting us to pause, to look and, perhaps, to see something differently.

Congratulations and the highest admiration are warmly extended to Oliver Bailey, Archie Baker, Andrew Boyle, Remy Burrows, James Chew, Ashton Clarke, Howard Clayton, Alessandro Feltracco, Henry Gorton, Benjamin Gross, Matias Guillen, Oliver Keller, Joshua Kim, Remy Lavigne, Ewan Mellows, Kevin Ning, Sebastian Ossowski, Archer Platt, James Rinder, Yui Segal, Hilton Sinton, Miles Watt and Rico Zou on their outstanding exhibition.

Even though I am fully aware of the struggles, the peaks and troughs, the difficult conversations, the toil, the time, the effort and the frustrations that lie behind these works, I still found myself on opening night completely amazed by what you had achieved. There is, of course, an erroneous tendency to imagine that works such as these simply appear: that the finished photograph, print, painting, drawing, sculpture or ceramic object somehow arrived fully formed. Indeed, not. Each of the twenty-three works photographed here has emerged through years of learning, experimentation and refinement, and through the particular traditions of the Grammar Visual Arts department and its atelier model of art education.

Another great Irishman, the playwright, novelist and poet Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), understood something of this when he wrote his Homage to Jack B. Yeats in 1954. Reflecting upon Yeats’s extraordinary artistic achievement, Beckett described him as a “courageous artist” and wondered where, indeed, such a man of genius had sprung from. Standing before the work of these twenty-three young artists on opening night, I found myself asking a similar question. Where did all of this come from?

The answer for both of us, of course, is that it came from somewhere – from years of looking and learning, from conversations and critique, from technical instruction and experimentation, from failure and persistence, from the influence of artists who came before them. These works did not appear from nowhere. They have been made.

And yet, even knowing all of this, I found myself on the evening of 28 August 2026, as Beckett did when contemplating Yeats, able to do little more than “bow in wonder.”

Class of 2026

On behalf of your Form VI studio masters we wish you every happiness and success for the future; you have been an absolute joy to teach.

We hope that the things you have learned, the skills you have developed and the ideas you have pursued during your time with us will remain with you long after you leave Grammar. Keep visiting galleries, keep looking closely at the world and, most importantly, keep making. You have learned enough to know that an artist’s practice is never really finished, and there is no reason for yours to stop simply because you have left College Street.

You will be remembered.

With our warmest good wishes for whatever comes next.