Visual Arts and Numeracy: Inside out - Public art

Visual Arts and Numeracy: Inside Out – Public Art

Public art activates the imagination and encourages audiences to engage, reconsider, and perceive the environment in which they live more deeply. In this resource, Geraldine Burke and Nish Belford encourage students to explore public art as a topic of inquiry to stimulate their learning and thinking in, through, and about the visual arts. This lesson involves a cross-disciplinary approach to explore society and the interconnections between people’s lives and social spheres. Public art offers several ways to include numeracy skills within Visual Arts. Different aspects of numeracy are used across different visual arts forms in making public art (murals, sculptures, installation, computer-generated artworks, and photography). In studying artists’ use of mathematical processes, students develop an understanding of what is involved in design procedures. They explore how artists use scale and proportion, such as comparing size of sculpture, in relation to human scale. For instance, scale and proportion are design elements that are often considered simultaneously by artists and architects in various artworks. This sequence is part of a 'Numeracy in the Curriculum initiative by Department of Education and training, Victoria. https://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/teachingresources/discipline/maths/Pages/numeracy-for-all-learners.aspx