Free HSC Visual Arts Flashcard Review

The agency of artists, art critics and art historians and the work they produce. It is intentional, informed human activity in which beliefs, actions, motives and ideas are built up over time, and it is shaped by social structures, positions, actions and sequences that affect the choices, procedures and judgements a practitioner makes.

Artmaking practice, art criticism practice and art history practice. All three are treated as forms of agency with their own procedures; the written paper (Art criticism and art history, 50 marks) examines your understanding of all three, while your own artmaking practice is examined through the submitted body of work.

The capacity to act intentionally and to produce effects in the visual arts. Saying artists, critics and historians have agency means their work is deliberate and consequential rather than accidental: they choose materials, procedures and value positions, and those choices change what audiences understand.

Intentional: the practitioner acts with purposes and anticipated outcomes rather than by chance. Informed: the action draws on prior knowledge, conventions, training and precedent. In an exam answer this lets you argue that a technical decision is also a conceptual decision, because it was chosen from alternatives the practitioner knew about.

The gradual instilling and absorbing of beliefs, actions, motives and ideas over time, through training, repetition, apprenticeship, education and exposure to a field. It explains why practice is cumulative: an artist's current decisions carry the habits and commitments built up across years of working.

Social structures, positions, actions and sequences set the conditions in which choices, procedures and judgements are made — what training is available, what materials can be afforded, which subjects are sanctioned, which practitioners hold authority, and what order events happen in. Practice is therefore never purely private invention.

Because what counts as practice keeps changing: it is informed by the new and emergent (technologies, materials, critical theories) and equally by the re-emergence of traditional conventions. A definition of practice fixed at one moment will not describe the field a decade later.

(1) Innovations, new knowledge and technologies that make new procedures and forms possible; (2) new agents entering the field — practitioners, institutions and audiences who bring different interests and value positions. The field has a history, so change is cumulative rather than a series of blank slates.

Older procedures, forms and craft skills returning to prominence in current practice, often reworked for new purposes — for example a return to hand-processes, figuration or traditional materials within contemporary art. It shows practice is not a straight line of progress; tradition is a live resource, not a superseded stage.

The network of procedures an artist uses to make art — the materials, processes, techniques, styles and qualities selected and organised to represent subject matter in a form. It is sustained and adaptive: procedures are revised as intentions clarify across a work or body of work.

'Network' insists the procedures are interdependent rather than a checklist: a change of material forces a change of technique, which changes the qualities of the surface, which changes what the work can mean. In writing, use it to link a technical observation to a conceptual claim instead of listing media.

The physical or virtual substances a work is made from and with — pigment, clay, thread, timber, steel, light, code, found objects. Materials carry associations (fragility, permanence, value, labour, waste) that become part of meaning, so identify the material specifically rather than writing 'mixed media'.

The sequences of action by which a work is brought into being — casting, firing, weaving, printing, editing, layering, assembling. A process typically has stages and duration, so it is where evidence of sustained decision-making and revision appears.

The specific skilled manipulations within a process — impasto, glazing, cross-hatching, scumbling, slip-casting, dodging and burning, jump-cutting. Techniques are learned and refined, so naming the right one is the fastest way to show technical literacy in a plate response.

A process is the overall sequence of making (e.g. etching a plate and pulling an edition); a technique is a particular skilled operation used within it (e.g. aquatint to produce tonal areas). Process answers 'how was this made, step by step'; technique answers 'what skilled manipulation produced this mark'.

The consistent, recognisable manner in which an artist or group handles form — recurring compositional habits, mark-making, palette and treatment of subject. Style can be individual, shared by a movement, or period-based, and it lets historians group and compare works.

The perceptible characteristics a work possesses as a result of its materials and handling — texture, weight, translucency, scale, finish, tonal range, temperature of colour, pace in time-based work. Qualities are what an audience actually encounters, so they are the bridge from description to interpretation.

The way an artist selects and develops subject matter and form so that a work stands for, refers to or reconstructs something in the world. Representation is not copying: it involves choice, emphasis, omission and framing, all of which carry a point of view.

What a work is about or depicts — the people, places, objects, events, ideas or conditions taken up by the artist. Subject matter includes non-figurative content such as duration, memory or systems; a work can have subject matter without depicting recognisable things.

The material and organisational shape given to subject matter — the expressive form chosen, plus scale, composition, colour, structure, editing and installation. Form is how subject matter is made available to an audience, and different forms make the same subject matter mean differently.