1. Welcome
Thank you for using this pre-visit resource. We believe this will help strengthen student learning leading up to and during your gallery visit.
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Learning Experiences Outside the Classrom
Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts
Phone: (09) ext 7703
Jeremy Leatinu’u
Education Coordinator

2. Art with an Artist Art with an Artist: Te Tuhi pre-visit lesson 1
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3. Welcome to Art with an Artist
During the next few lessons we will be exploring…
Positive and negative space
Copy vs original
The art of casting
Welcome…
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4. Let’s start this lesson by exploring “Postive and negative space”.
Let’s start this lesson by exploring “Positive and negative space”
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5. If we think about a specific object say a chair or stool,
we can see there are positive and negative spaces
What is negative and positive space?
Let’s take a look…
What is negative and positive space?

6. The stool has become white. This tells us that this is positive space.
Here is a stool…
Let’s turn the lights off to help
see where the positive and
negative spaces are.
Everything around the stool is black. This tells us that this is negative space.
The chair is white, which tells us that this is positive space.
Everything around the chair is black, which tells us that this is negative space.
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7. To help me remember I was told…
“for every positive shape there is a negative space surrounding it”.
For every positive shape, there is a negative space surrounding it.
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8. Let’s look at some complicated shapes and
find the positive and negative space.
car
The positive space is the car which would mean the space around
the car is the negative.
Where would the positive space be in this picture?
Let’s try another picture…
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9. Image: http://www.infonews.co.nz/news.cfm?id=58417
Looking at this night time
photograph, where would the
positive space be in this picture?
The sky tower and surrounding
buildings become the positive
space in this picture.
Which means the night sky is the
negative space.
Let’s try another picture…
Sky tower
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10. The stationary makes up the positive space.
Looking at this photograph,
where would the positive spaces
be in the picture?
Which means the green table is the negative space.
Let’s take a look at how negative and positive space is used to make art…
Stationary
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11. When showing his photographs Peter likes to display them upside down.
Peter Wegner
Peter’s photographs play with positive and negative space making us look at things we may not have seen at first.
The sky originally being the negative, now appears as the positive space. The
buildings which were originally the positive appear as the negative space.
When showing his photographs Peter likes to display them upside down.
Showing his photographs in this way creates interesting shapes and
changes the overall appearance of the landscape.
The dark buildings and cars are the positive space and sky in the
background is the negative space.
The photograph now makes us look at the shape of the sky,
which now looks like a tall building made of sky.
Artist Peter Wegner takes photographs of tall buildings
with the sky in the centre.
Can you find the positive space in both photographs?
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12. Rachel cast the entire inside of a house!
Rachel cast the inside space of a room. In the front of the sculpture you can see where the fireplace would have been.
Rachel cast the space underneath wooden seats.
Rachel Whiteread
Rachel cast the entire inside of a house!
Here are a few more other artworks Rachel has made and cast in concrete.
Like the staircase she has changed the negative space into positive space.
Rachel is interested in making the negative space become positive by filling it
with concrete. First Rachel covers all entry points with wood and nails. She
then fills the negative space with concrete and waits for it to dry.
Like artist Peter Wegner and his photographs, Rachel uses negative and positive space to create art that makes us see things that we may
not have seen at first.
And how did she cast an entire staircase? Let’s take a look…
With this artwork Rachel was interested in space surrounding the staircase. She decided to highlight the space around the staircase by filling and casting it in concrete. surrounding each step.
Here is a stair case made from wood. The stair case is the positive space and
the space around it is the negative space.
Once the concrete dries Rachel then pulls away the wooden walls and
staircase, leaving a concrete cast of the staircase
Artist Rachel Whiteread creates large and unusual sculptures that look like the inside of buildings and houses.
The negative space has now become the positive space.
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13. Let’s recap on what we have learnt so far…
As we have seen, positive and negative space can
play an important part in how we make art…
Let’s recap on what we have learnt so far…
Lets recap on what we have learnt…

14. What did we learn so far? Positive and negative space
are two completely different spaces. Positive space being the physical shape of something and the negative being the space around it.
seem to change places as seen in John Wegner’s photographs of the sky and city.
can be made into a sculpture by casting the negative space (or inside space), such as Rachel’s concrete house.

15. In the next lesson we will explore “Copy vs Original”.
End of lesson