Developing a cohesive body of work through inquiry: WACE Year 12 Visual Arts

What this dot point is asking

In Unit 3 the focus is Commentaries, and the art-making organiser asks you to engage with the social and cultural purposes of art to produce a unique and cohesive body of work. This dot point sits at the very start of that process. SCSA wants to see broad and innovative inquiry: you conceptualise and document experiences drawn from contemporary society, then transform those raw observations into developed concepts using innovative approaches to art making and presentation. The word cohesive is doing a lot of work here. The examiners and your school markers are not looking for a folder of unrelated experiments, but for a sustained line of inquiry where each artwork, study and resolved piece clearly belongs to the same conceptual family.

The first stage is generating an inquiry. Commentaries means your work says something about the society you live in, so your starting point should be an observation, tension or experience that genuinely interests you. A student might notice how strangers on a train avoid eye contact while staring at phone screens, and frame an inquiry question such as: how does personal technology change the way we share public space? That single question becomes the spine of the whole body of work. Everything that follows can be traced back to it, which is what gives the body of work its cohesion.

The second stage is documentation. SCSA expects you to document your thinking and working practices, usually in a visual diary, design folio or journal. This is not a neat afterthought written up at the end. It is a running record of photographs you take, sketches, colour tests, written reflections, annotated images of artists you research, and decisions about why you rejected one direction and pursued another. Markers read this documentation to understand how your concept grew, so make your reasoning explicit rather than only showing pretty pages.

The third stage is transformation. SCSA uses the verb transform deliberately: you take ideas and shape them into developed concepts using innovative approaches. Transformation means your first idea should not be your final idea. The train-and-phones observation might evolve into a study of hands, then into fragmented self-portraits where faces are obscured by glowing rectangles, then into an installation of small lit boxes. Each step keeps the original concern but pushes it somewhere less obvious. This is where genuine inquiry separates a high band response from a literal one.

The fourth stage is working with flexibility across media and art forms. The Unit 3 description explicitly allows you to work across media, so you are not locked into one technique. You might combine photography, drawing and digital manipulation if that best serves the concept. The choice of media should be driven by meaning. If your commentary is about fragmentation, collage or montage may carry that idea better than a single seamless painting, and you should be able to justify that choice in your documentation.

The final stage is resolution and the sense of a complete body of work. A resolved body of work shows that you carried the inquiry through to confident, finished outcomes rather than stopping at experiments. Cohesion is judged across the whole submission: a marker should be able to look at your resolved pieces and your documentation together and see one sustained argument about contemporary society, expressed in a controlled and consistent visual language. Keep checking your developing work against your original inquiry question, and prune anything that no longer belongs.