Core Areas
The IB DP Visual Arts course encourages students to engage in art-making as inquiry.
Through the three core areas - Create, Connect, and Communicate - students explore, contextualise, and express their artistic vision. Each area is iterative and interconnected, supporting students in becoming thoughtful, skilled, and reflective artists.
Create: Experimentation and Growth
Where creativity gets messy, magical, and meaningful.
Creativity doesn’t start with perfection, it starts with play. Create is about diving in, making glorious mistakes, and discovering what’s possible when you stop worrying about the outcome. Students are encouraged to take risks, follow curiosity, and develop their visual language through hands-on making. This is where the spark happens.
What Students Will Do
Experiment with Materials: Use unexpected tools, materials, and methods to push creative boundaries.
Develop Visual Language: Let style emerge through process, not pressure.
Take Risks: Try. Fail. Try again. Because growth lives just outside the comfort zone.
Key Practices
Keeping a visual journal as a playground for ideas
Participating in creative ‘labs’ and mini-challenges
Asking “what if?” more than “what should?”
Why Create Matters
Resilience: Real learning happens when things don’t go to plan.
Expression: Making becomes a way of speaking without words.
Mastery: Skills sharpen when driven by purpose, not perfection.
Examples in Practice
One student layers stitched threads into clay slabs, discovering a tension between fragility and strength.
Another asks, “How does material transformation reflect emotional healing?”, using melting wax, wire, and thread.
Connect: Context and Meaning
Art is never made in a vacuum — it’s shaped by stories, symbols, and systems.
Connect is where curiosity turns outward. Students explore how artists respond to their worlds and how their own identities, beliefs, and experiences shape the work they make. This is about deep listening, looking closely, and finding your place in the conversation. Through research, reflection, and connection, students begin to understand that meaning isn’t fixed — it’s layered, shifting, and alive.
What Students Will Do
Trace Contexts: Unearth the cultural, political, and personal forces that influence artists, and themselves.
Seek Resonance: Find ideas, artists, and images that echo their own questions.
Reflect Honestly: Explore how their story, background, and beliefs inform their creative voice.
Key Practices
Following threads of curiosity in artist research
Looking through multiple lenses — historical, social, symbolic
Sharing perspectives in critique and discussion
Why Connect Matters
Empathy: Builds bridges across cultures, time, and experience.
Insight: Helps students understand not just art, but themselves.
Relevance: Grounds art-making in the world it speaks to.
Examples in Practice
A student researching Syrian art finds unexpected kinship with an artist using ruins and thread to speak of memory.
Another compares graffiti in Cape Town and São Paulo, and begins painting their own walls with questions of power and place.
Communicate: Curating and Presenting
Art becomes powerful when it’s shared, and that sharing is its own creative act.
In Communicate, students become storytellers, curators, and choreographers of meaning. It’s about more than just “presenting”, it’s about shaping how the viewer enters and experiences the work. From titles to layout, from final exhibitions to quiet gestures, this is where intention meets audience. It’s the moment the work leaves the studio and starts a conversation.
What Students Will Do
Craft Clarity: Make decisions that support, not distract from, meaning.
Curate with Care: Consider sequence, scale, and space as part of the story.
Engage Emotionally: Think about how it feels to encounter the work, and why that matters.
Key Practices
Writing texts that are personal and purposeful
Designing exhibitions that speak, guide, and invite
Shaping the viewer’s experience through details and design
Why Communicate Matters
Voice: Helps students stand behind their work with clarity and care.
Connection: Invites audiences into dialogue, not just display.
Integration: Brings together process, intention, and final outcome.
Examples in Practice
- A student curates a series exploring identity, writing an artist statement contextualising their use of symbolism and colour.
- Another student creates a digital portfolio highlighting their experimentation with light and shadow, refining the presentation based on feedback.
How These Core Areas Interconnect
The three core areas aren’t steps to follow, they are threads that weave together. In real-world creative practice, making, meaning, and message evolve together. This approach nurtures students as thoughtful, flexible artists who can move between experimentation, research, and communication with intention and insight.
Example: Symbolic Object + Environmental Installation
A student intuitively sculpts a small vessel-like form from natural clay and thread, unsure of its purpose (Create). Through research into rituals and symbolic artefacts in West African and Norse traditions, they come to see it as a talisman for transition (Connect). They later photograph the object in different landscapes and curate these images into a projection-based installation that explores displacement and home (Communicate).
Feel supported at every stage of the new IB Visual Arts course.
These cards are shaped by lived experience and offer calm, practical guidance on everything from structuring the AIP to writing with clarity and intention. They’re here to make the complex feel clear, and to help you focus on what really matters.
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