THUNDER BAY — A Grade 12 Hammarskjold High School student was one of nine provincial winners the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF) selected for its Student Achievement Awards.
As the recipient of the Judge’s Choice Award, Amelia Jardine received $1,000 and was invited to attend the federation’s annual general meeting in Toronto, which screened a video showcasing her art.
Her teacher, Sarah Johnston, accompanied her to the meeting earlier this week.
“Everything went super smoothly. The OSSTF staff were super helpful and the environment there was just very positive overall,” said Jardine.
For the competition, she submitted a pencil drawing called Duet, detailing the final song of the extinct bird Kaua’i ʻōʻō, which was judged at the school, district, regional and provincial levels.
When Jardine found out she won, she said she was "very excited."
“When it comes to these types of things, I like to put it out of my mind so I don’t really get my hopes up. So, when I heard the news that I actually got it, it was pretty nice,” said Jardine.
She explained the message of her art was about conservation, protecting vulnerable species and how that’s “important to us as people.”
“The prompt for the award was ‘Is anyone out there?’ and their whole theme was space… I don’t really feel inspired by space,” said Jardine.
“And I kind of (thought) in myself like I don’t know why people focus on going out to space when we’re kind of ruining the planet that we have here and it doesn’t matter if anything’s out there if we don’t have anything here, so I just want to inspire that sentiment in other people.”
Although she didn’t know what to do when she initially heard the prompt on the school announcements, a childhood memory caught her mind.
“I was kind of brought back to this YouTube video that I had watched when I was little about this bird that was the last bird of its species and it was doing a mating call,” said Jardine.
“And it was really sad because there were no other birds to hear its call and I was like, ‘Oh, that bird’s calling: Is anyone out there?’ and the answer is ‘no.’”
She explained that the art piece tends to make people kind of sad when they hear the story.
“They’re like, ‘Oh, that poor thing.’ Sarah (Johnston) says that she made a boardroom of the teachers start crying when she told people about that,” said Jardine.
However, she added that people have been very supportive of the award.
“They’re very happy that I’m getting recognition for the award and generally school, too, because we haven’t really won anything like this,” said Jardine.
After winning one of these competitions, Jardine said it makes it seem more realistic to win things now, so she would be more likely to submit work in other stuff she hears of.
Looking ahead, Jardine has also already been accepted into Sheridan Illustration and plans to get an Honours Bachelor of Illustration.
She said she wants to be a medical illustrator, which would mean attending the University of Toronto for Biomedical Communications.
