Abstract

Artistic expression utilises practical creativity as a communication tool for the development of new understandings across cultures. This is equally valid for contemporary artists as it has been for our ancestral artists and artisans. Throughout human history creative arts practice has been instrumental in providing interactive, reflective, analytical contexts in which to draw out new knowledge and build new meaning systems. It has the ability to cross cultural boundaries and to make comment on and about the periphery, by mediating unfamiliar cultural forms and providing connections between people and cultures, and between past and present. The outcome of the application of this creative process is the generation of knowledge and understanding that can afford a multiplicity of ways of encountering and representing intercultural experiences.