BASSENDEAN Primary School will receive $80,000 from the Cook government as part of a state initiative to help schools connect Western Australian arts organisations and creative practitioners.
“The lessons and benefits students gain by incorporating creativity across curriculum areas are essential to every child’s educational experience,” Culture and the Arts Minister David Templeman said.
Twenty thousand dollars will be set aside for the school’s The Bilya Project 2025: Stories of Us, while the remaining $60,000 will go towards the Night/Time project.
“Creative learning is important to allow stories to be told in new and imaginative ways,” Bassendean PS primary educator and arts specialist Kylie Barr said.
The Bilya Project 2025 is an extension of the 2023 project which explores the relationship between residents and the local river.
“Most people in Bassendean see themselves as closely linked to the river,” Mrs Barr said.
“If you ask people where they’re from, they say, ‘Bassendean, we live by the river’,”
The 2023 project involved students collecting stories from community members of all ages and from different walks of life.
The new project will still involve this line of storytelling but will include the students working collaboratively with young WA artist, Kristy Nita Brown.
The collected stories will be published in a book with the children’s artwork alongside it in late term four.
The Night/Time project is in collaboration with local artists in the scope of multimedia, filmmaking, choreography, visual art and music.
“We’ve come together to celebrate storytelling again,” Mrs Barr said.
“But through the magical space and time between dusk and dawn.
“It will incorporate lots of different ideas about constellations, the night sky, monsters underneath the bed and nocturnal animals.”
The final product will be presented to the community in September as art installations in buildings along Old Perth Road.
Mrs Barr said people will be able to walk in and reimagine the old buildings through the projections, videos and physical artworks.
“It’s about revitalising parts of Bassendean and letting the community see it in a different way.
“But also giving our kids the artistic experience of the community seeing their artwork.
“Not just their friends and family who come to an art exhibition in the school grounds.”
Mrs Barr hopes the projects will encourage all Western Australians to explore the benefits of creativity.
“Through these artistic endeavours, they can really explore who they are in this place, space and time.”