Art: Bhajan Hunjan and Collage

In art, we have recently been learning about Bhajan Hunjan. She is an artist who grew up in Kenya, but was originally from India. In her childhood, she was surrounded by people who used the materials around them in creative ways. Her mother and grandmothers spent time sewing, embroidering and gardening. Bhajan would often create things with her family, continuing to use materials from her childhood even as an adult – they reminded her of home.

She uses lots of different materials in her art, and can include shapes and symbols. In one of her pieces, she used metal to create a gate with lots of cut-out pieces and we managed to spot a deer!

After learning a bit more about her as an artist, we looked at three different pieces of art and discussed what we noticed. We saw lots of different colours and shapes, and were able to stay what we liked about her work. After this, we imitated another piece of art, and practiced sketching the shapes that we could see.

We then focused on our own designed and through about what we could hide within our collage, we thought about including our names and symbols that might mean something to us. We sketched our design and then labelled this with materials that we might like to use. We knew that we would use paper and card, as this is something that Bhajan Hunjan has used quite often.

After our designs were complete, we started our making! We cut lots of materials and fabrics and then added these to our card. We know that collage is when you add different materials to one canvas, which for us, was plain card. We will soon evaluate our work and think about what we like and what we might do differently if we were to make a collage again.

Well done for all of your hard work, Year 2! Your pieces of art were incredible and you should be very proud. What did you like most about your artwork and why?