Placing identity, identifying place: an investigation of the role of place and identity in artistic thought and practice

Abstract

This thesis explores the phenomena of place and identity in the visual artistic practices of four artists and myself. Using narrative case study and autoethnography, three research questions were investigated and answered:1. What can be understood about each artist’s account of place and identity?2. How do the artists encounter, use, or draw on, themes of place and identity in their creative practice, products, and thinking?3. In what ways do the artists’ places influence their constructions of identity?Methods and techniques used to investigate these questions were interview, observation and artefact analysis.Hermeneutic philosophy was compatible with the investigation of individual insights and experiences of five artists due to its focus on the interpretation of verbal and non-verbal communication. Methodologies of qualitative narrative research were used to foreground artists’ explanations and interpretations of their own artworks and encourage storying of themselves. I investigated my own place, identity and artistic practice through autoethnography.Heidegger’s contribution to place philosophy is discussed as this along with other theories contributed to notions of place as experience. Notions of space and place are reviewed that include historical developments such the spatial turn. This turn challenged the way space and place were understood within disciplines and inspired a turn toward more interdisciplinary understandings of place and space. Geography moved toward a critical geography that included humanist geography, socialist and cultural geography (Peake, 2014) and led to the modern notion that people help create spaces and places. Identity theories are explored to show how identities form and construct as a result of personal, social, cultural, relational and other influences. Artists and their practices are positioned in a dialogic relationship as places form identities and identities form places. This study sought to understand how this relationship was played out in artistic practice. Multiple, personal insights that each of the five artists expressed about place, identity and his/her artistic practice became understood through thematic narrative analysis. As researcher and one of the artists in the study, I engaged in a hermeneutic spiral that took me deeply into understanding similarities and differences between my own and each of the four artist-participant’s experiences and insights.Each artist expressed his or her unique embodied understandings of place and identity in the context of his or her visual artistic practice. Past place experiences influenced the kind of places that each artist chose to be in or chose to explore in his/her art. As such, Each artist experienced place as a physical location as well as a sensory experience. Being in a locale engaged in artistic practice triggered ideas, emotions, feelings and memory about other places. This highlighted the important dimension of being in a locale and also the “here” and “there” experiences of being in or contemplating place. The “here” was where the artwork tended to be created, but the “there” were places some artists had experienced or places they were creating their art for - such as galleries. Themes that related to travel, changing places, feeling a part of places, on the fringe of places or outside of places emerged. For one artist, his identity was tied up with being known as a “Melbourne painter.” Another artist embodied the identity of an “Australian artist” but also worked to create a new notion of Australian art and Identity as Australian artist.The findings contribute to the understanding of place and highlight how art and artistic practice are forms of place-making and place-based research. Understanding artistic practice as place and identity research adds to the discourse on the use of arts practice as research methodologies. Such insights into artistic practice through the lens of place and identity may be used to inform arts policy; My hope is that just as identity and place are valued for their centrality in Australian Indigenous art, place and identity can also be valued when judging and assessing art of other cultures. As a way forward, a list of artistic place experiences are provided that are currently being developed into teaching and learning modules for art students and pre-service teachers.