Issues for consideration

• Look carefully at your classroom or school. Where are the empty spaces or the spaces you take for granted? Create a series of drawings and photographs based on these spaces. Compare the works you create to the works in the Flatlands exhibition.

• Define public and private environments. Where would you find them in your world? How do these environments represent the people that occupy them? What do these private and public environments mean to you? Create a photo essay exploring variations in these types of places. Use text to support each image and to form a narrative that links the works together. Do you feel differently about these environments now? If so, in what way?

• Use photography as a medium to create images of a day in your life. Consider the environments that are important to you as well as the places and spaces in between. Think about how you are taking the photograph, including the angle or perspective you have chosen. Do these decisions impact on the meaning of the work? In what ways have artists in this exhibition inspired you?

• This exhibition explores the notion of the image and the photographer’s role in transforming the way we perceive our world. Consider the role of the photographer. Is their role to convey reality or something more? Using examples from this exhibition, discuss how the artists have changed our perceptions.

• Many of the works in Flatlands feature devices that outline and contain space: streets, doorways, walls, windows, stairs and ceilings. Create a series of works using these subjects as inspiration. Choose one of your images to display and create a class exhibition. Outline your reasoning for selection and discuss how each student interpreted similar themes in different ways.

• Choose two artists from this exhibition who show different approaches to photography. Develop case studies comparing their art practice. Outline your opinion of their work and whether you think it has been successful.

• The artist Simryn Gill noted in 2006, ‘we leave the residues of ourselves, our actions, our fantasies, our passions, our histories, the choices we make in living, in the body of a place, like light on a film’. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Can you see evidence of this 'residue’ in the works in this exhibition?