As overall winners of this year’s Year 7&8 Wearable Arts competition, Year 8 students, Bianca Connell and Amy Savory, were lucky enough to be offered a workshop with Waiheke-based artist, Ann Skelly. Ann is a full time artist who has entered eleven of her own garments into the World of Wearable Arts (WOW) Show and has been successful with nine of them.

Bianca and Amy travelled to Waiheke to meet Ann where their first task was to scour the beach for anything interesting to use as inspiration.

Bianca and Amy report:

‘We were given a small bag and we started collecting odd shaped and strange textured objects.  Some of the objects we found were clumps of oyster shells, strange looking shells, bits of wood, seaweed, rocks, moss and many other objects.  We then headed back to Ann’s home.

For our next task, we were to unpack one of Ann’s WOW garments. The garment was made of shells, flower tubes and plastic bags. We were to read the instructions given and to put the garment together. Ann came down and was pleased to see that we had done it with no mistakes!

After this achievement, we were able to experiment with the objects that we collected at the beach. We were given vanish, pva glue, glitter paint and glitter. We found that if we put some PVA glue or varnish on the delicate white seaweed it became less fragile and didn’t fall apart each time we handled it.

After lunch we were shown around Ann’s amazing house and were privileged to be invited to try on some of her WOW garments from the past couple of years. Each costume was completely different. There was a sandwich called ‘A lunch on the run,’ a story book called ‘Spellbound,’ a garment made of foam pieces called ‘Lady Bacilli Cocci’ and a garment made of shells, plastic and flower tubes called Mistress Cristatella. We had many laughs and heaps of fun while trying on Ann’s amazing creations. 

Before we knew it, our time with Ann had come to an end. We didn’t want to leave as we had a heap of fun. Our thanks to Year 8 teacher, Mrs Slade, for organising this fantastic day for us and especially to Ann Skelly for inviting us to the island and making our day absolutely amazing!’

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