MICRO-BIO

• My PhD thesis addressed how cultures and identities are represented through an artistic expression. Central to the thesis is an understanding of discourses around culture, identity, postcolonial diaspora theory, migration, dislocation and relocation...More

  My PhD thesis addressed how cultures and identities are represented through an artistic expression. Central to the thesis is an understanding of discourses around culture, identity, postcolonial diaspora theory, migration, dislocation and relocation, identity crisis, and identity construction and cultural hybridisation. My research approach underscores my professional roles as an artist/ researcher/teacher. I used a/r/tography as a framework that merge the use of narratives, art as a ‘generative process’, a feminist approach of using art as performative to represent ‘affective links’ and identity. I have used 31 of my own paintings to build my data and these artworks were exhibited at the Deakin Phoenix Gallery in September 2012. Using a reflexive analysis of my paintings, I read and discussed the visual semiotics (signs, symbols and messages and meanings) in them. Visual methods and visual mapping and my experience as an artist and teaching in Visual Arts Education underscore my understanding and approach to use art a mode of expression to represent cultures and identities. Through my findings I discuss art expression to forge ‘affective links’ with reference to nostalgia, childhood memories, life experiences and how my gendered identities are ambivalent, hybrid and transient as I journey through different sites and roles and new experiences within new spaces, places and the temporal when migrating to Australia. I conclude on how my findings if exposed through ‘intimate publics’( social media, blogs, and a book ) and a public exhibition of my paintings will expose multiple perspectives about ancestry, cultural inheritances, sense of belonging and identity within cultural hybridity and transnationalism. My research informs new ways to understand diversity, art forms and cultures from different places and communities and how artistic expression is powerful and communicative in giving a ‘voice’ and sending messages and meanings. Through an engagement in professional development in Art Education workshops, I have developed teaching pedagogies and methods with school art activities that encourage intercultural understanding through Art Education in a multicultural Australia. Research interests: Postcolonial Diaspora theory, globalisation, migration and relocation, hybridity within identit(ies) and culture(s) and art as expression, art as a generative process, recognition of identit(ies) and culture(s) through Visual Art Education, cultural diversity and art as representation. I am registered with Victorian Institute of Teaching (VIT) and a member of Art Education Australia (AEA), Art Education Victoria (AEV) and of A/r/tographic inquiry: artograhicinquiry.grouply.com , Registered member of International Sociology Association Less

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