Spotlight on Artist Gina Partridge

Welcome to The Elective’s digital art museum, dedicated to the incredible work of AP Arts students. Each week we highlight a work or series created in one of the AP Arts concentrations—AP 2-D Art and Design, 3-D Art and Design, and AP Drawing (the AP Program also offers Art History and Music Theory)—as well as a statement from the artist (and, occasionally, their teacher).

From the first cave paintings to contemporary breakthroughs in virtually reality, art, in all its forms, has been a crucial way for people to process, make sense of, comment on, and grapple with the world around them. In 2020, there is a lot to process and grapple with—and AP Art students have risen to the challenge. The work many of them submitted in their final portfolios is explicitly of the moment, from commentary on the covid-19 pandemic to the celebration of people of color to the nature of heroism in perilous times.

The work is often challenging and provocative but always insightful, inspiring, and expansive.

This week we feature a charcoal-and-water work made by Gina Partridge from The Harker School in San Jose, California.

Here’s Gina’s statement on the work:

"While running a fever, I wanted to express my feelings in my body and document the passage of time. I created 24 drawings representing every hour of the day, documenting any pain or sensation I was feeling. Charcoal and water are the materials used for these drawings.

"How do you use materials? Do you paint with it, glue it on a surface, layer it on top of itself? The use of materials has been the main driving force of my sustained investigation. Over recent months, yarn has been my main source of inspiration. Something about the way cloth, yarn, etc interacts with each other and the environment around it is so beautiful. Though itself is a 3D material, I utilize it in my pieces using the techniques of drawing and create marks and lines across my canvas frame. Each piece is an interpretation of what drawing is to me and I utilized the warp and weft to carry out my exploration of materials.

"For most of my pieces, I let the cloth/yarn guide me into the end result. Some yarns conjured up images and ideas upon first glance, for others I had to start experimenting before I could figure out the direction I wanted my piece to go in."

And here are a few more images from Gina’s portfolio:

Student statements are lightly edited for length and clarity.