Shifting selves: the struggle for identity and spirituality in the work of three young women artists

Abstract

This essay looks at contemporary art works produced by three young women who took part in a research project that was exploring the spiritual meanings of art in the lives of adolescents. Nineteen students were interviewed and we asked them to tell us about their art works which we then analysed in relation to a set of descriptors that we developed defining spiritual symbols and stories. We developed a central term—Connected Knowing—which seeks to appreciate a ‘spiritual rationality’ in works of art. This essay reports on three of these art works and explores the ways in which the artist understands the connections between self and other, self and world, self and community. We used theory on art perception and gender to understand the ways in which spiritual meaning was produced by the artists. A central theme that emerged from the three works was that identity is a struggle and not a given, and that multiple perspectives of self in the development of identity is experienced as a positive embodied value.