Dee Jaeger has been connected with art at Hale School for decades. She was employed as the first art technician at Hale School in 1996, and later worked as a primary school art teacher at Hale before pursuing her Masters degree. Her graduate research was on landscape and environmental art, and this has sparked an abiding interest that has influenced her own art practice and her teaching, to the benefit of the students at Hale.
In the early 2000s, Dee developed a trial project to include visual art in the flagship Outdoor Education camp at Hale School. Dee joined the boys toward the end of their camp and talked about creating art from the materials they had to hand in the Exmouth environment. The workshop provided a valuable debriefing tool for the Outdoor Education instructors, allowing the boys to express their camp experience through creativity. From Dee’s perspective, it was also a way for the boys to learn a new way of looking at their immediate environment.
“It was a way to get in some ecological and environmental learning in a discrete way. You make friends with the climate by understanding it, by touching it.”
The trial project became a part of the Exmouth camp with Dee running the workshops for several years before the Outdoor Education instructors made it their own. She now works with the Year 4 boys at Hale each year during their camp experience on campus. Working with materials from the bush and some clay and natural ochres, she encourages the boys to think about their environment, how it was in the past and how it can be preserved for the future.
They also learn that art can be ephemeral. After they have made their work and displayed it in an outdoor gallery for all the other students to see, the boys place their work in the bushland play area to degrade naturally.
“It’s such an abundant area of learning. It’s creating something. From an artist’s perspective of looking at shape, line, colour, form, all the elements of art and design can come into it. But we don’t need to keep it. There’s a concrete thing. But it’s left behind and that in itself is another learning especially for young ones. They want to keep everything.”
In her own work, Dee is drawn to figurative and organic forms. She creates sculptures of the female form as well as “things that evolve, that just grow. They are not human, not plant. They are zoomorphic or biomorphic.”
“I’m really pulled in so many different directions. But I quite like that. It’s the doing of it that is really important, and working with the elements.”
Several of Dee’s works in this year’s exhibition are inspired by nature and the environment, particularly her ceramic work The Girl Who Loved Trees.
“There are many movements about tree therapy. In many cultures, going to the forest and touching trees and hugging trees is an ancient, holistic therapy.”
This work also draws inspiration from a 300-year old story of hundreds of women in India who were killed as they protested the cutting down of the sacred trees in their village. The Maharaja had ordered the trees cut down for a new palace, but when he heard of the women’s sacrifice, he repented and declared the area a protected conservation zone. Dee says the sculpture is a kind of embodiment of this beautiful story and the determination of the women behind it.
Come along to the Fine Art@Hale 2025 exhibition this weekend to see Dee’s works and that of nearly 100 other Western Australian artists. With artwork across the mediums of painting, sculpture, printmaking, glass, ceramic, textiles and jewellery, there is something for everyone to appreciate.