Beautiful work and amazing products are an integral part of our story at XP but equally important are the ways that we achieve that work and those products.

Our students are encouraged to draft and redraft, to refine their ideas, to not accept work that isn’t excellent. In the Arts team this year we’ve seen exactly that with students starting new courses and new expeditions and being given new opportunities to excel.

None of the pictures above show finished products, instead we can see the beauty of the creative process. For some that means painstakingly drafting and redrafting photoreal images using only pencils. For others it may be that a session sharing ideas on the whiteboard is the best way to make progress. Creating models and maquettes in a range of materials can be the catalyst that a student needs to make their creative vision into a beautiful final product. What looks at first glance to be a random collection of scraps can be actually a carefully curated abstract vision. A messy workbench will finally reveal a beautiful relief sculpture.

We celebrate our students creative work not only for the final curation but for the whole process of exploration, experimentation, and growth that leads them there — the ideas tried, the risks taken, and the skills developed along the way.