Art Yarning: On an Integrated Social Science Research Method

ABSTRACT

This article presents a messy social science research method that integrates art therapy tools and Indigenous yarning – a concept loosely translated as complex conversational storytelling. The method – Art Yarning – is an innovative research tool that mirrors and responds to the complex social and research realities in interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and researchers in Australia. Drawing on collaborative research with Indigenous communities on Gunditjmara and Wathaurong Countries in Victoria, I present and discuss Art Yarning as a ‘messy’ method (Law 2004): that is, as shifting, uncertain, slow, modest, and diverse, only capable of delivering situated, incomplete, temporary knowledge – a valuable, humbling position that recognises and respects boundaries around Indigenous knowledges. Art Yarning prioritises Indigenous and visual ways of knowing and challenges the problematic conviction that any social science method can deliver complete, single-source knowledge. Art Yarning enhanced participants’ sense of Indigenous identities, healing, and non-Indigenous participants’ adaptation to aspects of Indigenous ways of knowing-being-doing (Martin 2003). Rich multilayered new knowledge was achieved via processes that reduce power imbalance in research. Critically, the integrated method facilitates learning from, rather than learning about, Indigenous peoples in social science research.

KEYWORDS:

• Art therapy
• Indigenous Australians
• yarning
• visual methods
• decolonised research

Introduction

In her seminal work, Decolonising Methodologies, Smith describes research ‘as a significant site of the struggle between the interests and ways of knowing of the west, and the interests and ways of resisting of the Other’ (1999: 2). What constitutes ‘interests’, ‘ways of knowing’, and ‘struggle’ between and within this binary of ‘the west and the Other’? The division is anything but clearly bounded. The ongoing impact of colonisation necessitates that Indigenous peoples exist in a space that Nakata (2007a) terms the Cultural Interface. Here, the intersection of Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge systems creates complex, dynamic, multilayered, and multidimensional terrain from which Indigenous people come to re-know and re-define their ways of knowing-being-doing.¹ Additionally, contemporary immigration constantly complicates the traditional notion of ‘the west’ within Australian society; diverse positionality among non-Indigenous researchers complicates and expands what ‘the west’s interest and ways of knowing’ might mean.

I begin from the obvious proposition that we live in messy spaces where complexities and even apparent contradictions govern who and how we are, as both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in contemporary Australian society. This messiness is reflected in the ethical challenges that exist for research in Australian Indigenous contexts. First, researching with ‘the other’ does not eliminate the fact that ‘the other’ may have been singled out as ‘in need of’ research as other. Second, research in Indigenous contexts is often carried out by institutions that ultimately prioritise Eurocentric ways of knowing-being-doing. This arguably paradoxical research reality is particularly challenging for the upkeep of ethical conduct because researchers must balance expectations from the communities within which they research, with often conflicting expectations of ethics committees and funding bodies to whom they are accountable (Hawkes et al. 2017; Smith et al. 2019).

The exposure of imperialist research agendas as responsible for subjugation and exploitation of Indigenous peoples through positivist research methods (Smith 1999) has birthed efforts towards decolonised research methodologies. Assumptions about context-free reality, the taken-for-granted objectivity and detachment of the researcher, and the certainty attached to knowledge production ‘as truth’, do not align with – and in fact disrupt, oppress, minimise or disregard – Indigenous ways of knowing-being-doing (Smith 1999; Wilson 2001; Martin 2008). And yet, the alternative prevalence of qualitative methods – assumed to be ‘natural partners’ with ‘Indigenous methodologies’ – in research undertaken in Indigenous contexts can be problematic, and even damaging, especially if statistics that inform Indigenous policy exclude Indigenous input, on the assumption that Indigenous cultures are not engaged with quantitative methodologies (Walter and Suina 2019: 233). Any research methodology then, can be problematic in contexts of Indigenous research, if it includes a fixation on knowing how to know the other – if it carries with it the promise of new knowledge that is conditioned by, and relies upon, rules and procedures generated from a non-Indigenous viewpoint (Law 2004).

It is perhaps useful then, to view research with Indigenous peoples as a site of multiple struggles, defined by soft edges and blurry boundaries that themselves shift constantly between and within all parties involved – a site that calls for methods that acknowledge the healthy ‘messiness’ or complexity of identity, positionality and relationships. My overall argument in presenting the Art Yarning method is that a methodology that seeks to explicate these diverse and complex positions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in social and research contexts, cannot usefully do so by emphasising the opposition between ‘the west’ and ‘the other’. Rather, generative social science methods in such contexts must regularly recognise and acknowledge their constitution and deployment within what Nakata describes as ‘a complex set of social and discursive relations’ (2007a: 201).

Like other non-Indigenous scholars who collaborate with Indigenous academics and communities (Christie 2006; Isaacs et al. 2011; Wright et al. 2012; Smith et al. 2019), I find efforts toward and a focus on relationality – in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous paradigms – as both useful and most honest in serving the interests of all research actors engaged in a research project. Simultaneously, as a non-Indigenous researcher in Australia, I recognise the inherent tensions that exist within this position, and make explicit that my research interest in visual ways of knowing has had to be validated and open to regular scrutiny by my Indigenous collaborators.

Art Yarning

Art Yarning as a method was conceived for the Artful Mob – a research project undertaken in collaboration with Elders, Key Important Persons (KIP), the Ballarat and District Aboriginal Co-operative (BADAC) on Wathaurong Country, and Winda Mara, a community-controlled organisation on Gunditjmara Country. Artful Mob explores the values for social scientific research of methods derived from Indigenous knowledge systems and group art therapy. As a practical case study, it has involved participants’ reflections on the significance of the method for them, and my own reflections on what the method means in contrast, or in comparison to, traditional qualitative methods in Indigenous research contexts. However, the research is also an exploration of what kinds of knowledge – and, perhaps, what kinds of transformation – might be possible when this method is implemented.

Relationality: A Conceptual Meeting Place

Relationality in Indigenous Research

The merit of the Art Yarning method lies in the observation that relationality is a shared paradigm and value across Indigenous knowledge systems and within art therapy. Postcolonial theories focus on the creation and legitimisation of the intellectual space from which the unique experiences of Indigenous peoples can be included (Nakata 2007a; Moreton-Robinson 2013). As such, these theories are concerned with prioritising Indigenous research paradigms, governed by views of ontology, epistemology, axiology, and methodology as relational (Smith 1999; Martin 2003; Nakata 2007a; Wilson 2008). Within relational ontologies, Indigenous people view themselves in terms of multiple relations and connections binding the living with the non-living, with land, sky, animals, and plants – with all that is earth and beyond (Chilisa 2012). Subsequently, Indigenous epistemologies hold collective views of the nature of knowledge (Wilson 2008), where knowledge is constructed in complex, multilayered, and continuous ways (Christie 2006; Nakata 2007a; Martin 2010). Indigenous research paradigms prioritise axiologies that involve relational accountabilities.

Indigenous scholars often describe the concept of ‘the relational’ as a collective understanding of being – to be Indigenous is to enact relationality through the interconnectedness that binds a community (Wilson 2008; Tuck and McKenzie 2015). In developing the Relationally Responsive Standpoints Framework, Yunkaporta and Shillingsworth (2020) explain that ‘our relationships to people, Law and place shape our obligations, ethics and boundaries regarding what and how we investigate in the world’ (2020:1). Shotton et al. (2018) discuss relationality as a validity practice in Indigenous research – a daily practice that involves interconnections between researchers, families, communities and places that work together to conceptualise and validate research beyond traditional researcher-participants roles. Going further, Tynan (2020) proposes treating research as kin, extending relational accountabilities to include both writing process and the thesis. Multilevel privileging of relationality means that ‘knowledge production is collective, and in that sense deeper, purposeful, and respectful’ (Shotton et al. 2018: 639).

Research methodologies within Indigenous contexts reflect relational accountabilities when they centre on relational ontologies and include methods that promote knowing through multiple relationships (Louis 2007; Wilson 2008). As I elaborate next, art therapy is built on understanding the self as relational (i.e. it has a relational ontology); and Art Yarning method centres dynamics of knowing on participants’ engagement with their images, and with each other, as they share with others about their work.

Art Therapy Methodologies

Art therapy is a form of guided art-making that constitutes a journey of the self into the self and beyond the self, facilitated by a therapist in an individual or group context. It is essentially about harnessing various relationships simultaneously to promote healing (Hogan 2000; McNiff 2004). Theories such as the Expressive Therapies Continuum (Kagin and Lusebrink 1978), which posits the different effects of art materials on our psyches; Jungian analytic understandings of the art therapy relationship as triangular (artist–artwork–art therapist) (Schaverien 2000); group knowledge and its function and development within art (Liebmann 2004); and tools such as image dialogue (Malchiodi 2011), highlight the discipline’s primary focus on multidimensional relationships. In other words, art therapy is about healing through the enactment of multiple connections and relations with: each other; the art studio; the materials; and the images produced by ourselves and others (Rubin 2001; Liebmann 2004; Malchiodi 2011).

The creative process facilitates and makes apparent the relations between self and others, community and world, illuminating ‘our relatedness to the outer world. Inner and outer become one’ (Rogers 2001: 176). Art therapy, particularly in group contexts, holds knowledge as relational – as that which comes to be known through multiple human and non-human relationships. It is conceivable, therefore, that art therapy – with its focus on transformation through relationality – may be a congruent, or at least acceptable, mode of interaction with those who prioritise relationality in their ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies – in this case, with participants on Wathaurong Country and Gunditjmara Country.

Integration

Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars have highlighted the enriching value of multidirectional borrowing from various knowledge systems (Sandoval 2000; Christie 2006; Swadener and Mutua 2008). On a conceptual level, Sandoval (2000) calls for the development of a ‘coalitional consciousness’ that brings oppressed people together with all people of the world to work toward social change. On a research level, Chilisa (2012) suggests that combining western and Indigenous theories is one dimension of Indigenous research. A growing collection of researchers have employed various degrees of integrated methodologies successfully in Indigenous research contexts (Cochran et al. 2008; Isaacs et al. 2011; Wright et al. 2012; Roy 2014; Kite and Davy 2015). This literature calls for a critical reframing of western research methods in Australia, to include Indigenous principles of cultural safety, social justice, and community partnership (Roy 2014) at a local level, in order to express the heterogeneity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Kite and Davy 2015).

Methodological integration of Indigenous methods of yarning are popular in existing decolonised methodologies (Wilson 2001; Bessarb and Ng’andu 2010; Kovach 2010; Wright et al. 2012). Yarning is a cultural form of conversation (Bessarab and Ng’andu 2010) that also involves visual and physical elements, along with the dynamic conversations that occur between humans and non-humans (Walker et al. 2014). In other words, yarning is a common Indigenous protocol through which some Indigenous people know-be-do the foundational concept of relationality – a means of conveying knowledge that ‘uphold[s] the relational which is necessary to maintain a collectivist tradition’ (Kovach 2010: 42).

Bessarab and Ng’andu (2010) describe four types of yarning: social; therapeutic; research-topic focused; and, collaborative. Walker et al. (2014) consider additional forms of family yarning and cross-cultural yarning. Out of the various forms that yarning takes in research, collaborative, research topic focused, and cross-cultural types of yarning are of specific interest to the integrative approach of this research project, and can be considered as intersecting with the formal and informal verbal sharing processes that occur in group art therapy. To restate, Art Yarning does not simply reflect integration through tokenistic inclusion of ‘yarning protocol’, but rather reaches more deeply into collaborative dynamics to reflect knowledge production through relationality.

In Smith’s (1999) description of research as a site of struggle between western and Indigenous worldviews, the integration of ideas, knowledges, and theories is seen as a valuable tool with which oppressed people can reclaim power over their ways of knowing-being-doing, in the realities of their lives where the oppressed and the oppressor exist together. As Chilisa declares, ‘mixing is the methodology of survival for the oppressed’ (2012: 24). Non-Indigenous researchers who have no collective history of oppression cannot use survival as a reason to integrate knowledge systems. The commitment to integration needs justification that goes beyond the (un)comfortable position of the non-Indigenous researcher. A genuine desire to learn from Indigenous peoples for the benefit of society is a research interest that subsequently challenges dominant research paradigms. Such an approach, to paraphrase Chilisa (2012), makes ‘mixing’ a challenging methodology of decolonisation for non-Indigenous researchers.

Art Yarning: Background Context

To explicate the Art Yarning method, several framing declarations are necessary. First, the developing knowledge I share about Indigenous ways of knowing-being-doing reflects outsider rather than expert knowledge. Second, the method assumes the validity of visual expression as a way of knowing, and affirms that speaking visually does not require artistic skill. Third, inspired by shared beliefs about relationality across Indigenous knowledge systems and within art therapy, yarning here also means conversing with the artworks, the art materials, the micro-space where the process takes place, with Country as host – while viewing all these interactions as contributing to research. Fourth, the term knowledge synthesis here replaces the phrase ‘findings and data analysis’ as part of an ongoing process to develop a decolonising research language that reflects a relational ontology and collective epistemology. This indefinite, multiple-realities perspective begins to recognise that forms of knowing are not independent, definite, and singular (Law 2004) but that we, the participants, cannot access knowledge in any entirety. This approach not only requires uncertain methods but also terminology that reflects a humbler position than is often assumed within the knowledge production process.

Finally, a clarification on the use of the word therapy. Art Yarning draws on specific techniques from art therapy, yet the language of ‘therapy’ carries a risk of pathologising participants by suggesting that the research looks to remedy assumed positions of deficit. Although healing and wellbeing are foundational to decolonising methodologies (Smith 1999; Dudgeon 2021), the healing value of the method here rests with Indigenous collaborators. Any therapeutic dimension claimed by participants through engagement with the Art Yarning method was here an outcome, rather than an initial aim, of the research design. I intentionally minimised the therapeutic dimension of the process by positioning myself as a researcher-participant, dismissing therapeutic tools such as questioning, paraphrasing, and gazing, and handing control over the use and manipulation of tools and processes to Elders, KIP, and participants. Interestingly, participants themselves did not view the term therapy as problematic and have reassured my ‘white anxiety’ that any potential healing preceded the use of this terminology.

Participants

Participants included eleven women at Winda Mara, ten people at BADAC, myself as a researcher-participant, and two staff members who volunteered for the co-facilitator role out of personal interest in art therapy, with the aim of facilitating future programs. Recruitment focused on interest in the testing of the method, rather than in a shared social/health issue. A recruitment poster to comply with institutional requirements for ethics approval didn’t fit well with these contexts. Instead, staff from the Family Service Programs used their relationships to recruit participants over many coffee dates and morning teas, including some I was fortunate to share in.

The messy whole of our participant group beautifully reflects social realities in contemporary Australia. Participants come from different Countries and vary in age, gender, educational background, and socioeconomic status. Some experience struggles with mental health and other issues; others describe themselves as healthy and able-bodied. Some participants have Indigenous and non-Indigenous parents, others are married to non-Indigenous persons, and others are children of the Stolen Generations (Australians Together 2010). Participants also included staff employed within the hosting organisations and at nearby Indigenous health services. All participants identified as Australian Indigenous persons, but the ways in which they understood themselves and their positions within these sets of relations differed from one another.

In addition, the initial groups decided to include three non-Indigenous persons in the process – individuals who were partners and friends of Indigenous participants. Finally, I was involved as a non-Indigenous, non-white, immigrant researcher-participant working with visual ways of knowing within an academic institution predominantly driven by western ontologies. Setting out to do research with Indigenous people, I did not plan for this diversity, yet our participant group is an example of exactly the sort of complex and multilayered space of the ‘Cultural Interface’ (Nakata 2007b) that challenges us to rethink our understandings of research in an Indigenous context.

Process

I spent formal and informal time with Elders, KIP, and staff members from the hosting organisations and in doing so, it was important to recognise differences, exercise acute listening, get comfortable with silence, and relax into authenticity. These ways of being helped me to learn about Indigenous ways of knowing-being-doing and about Gunditjmara and Wathaurong Countries on a practical, lived-experience level. During these times, I explained different art therapy techniques; the often-unpredictable process of mutual learning led us to design two twenty-week Art Yarning programs that reflected integration of art therapy tools within a local knowledge system. Critically, what makes Art Yarning an integrated method is that Indigenous collaborators make informed decisions on whether, how, and with what Indigenous knowledge, protocols, values, and behaviours to use the art therapy tools.

Some activities undertaken by participants include:

• Waterways – Significant waterways on Gunditjmara and Wathaurong Countries were discussed with participants. Participants chose a waterway that resonated with them (from their own Country if desired), and used materials to create both it, and themselves within it.

• Creation Story – After hearing the Creation Story of Gunditjmara/Wathaurong Country, participants created a response drawing. It could include any image that came to mind.

• The six seasons of the Aboriginal calendar – The six seasons were described to participants. Participants chose the season that depicts how they felt on that day, and created a visual response to it.

• Rose Bush (Modified) – Through guided imagery, participants were asked to imagine themselves as any Indigenous Australian native plant/tree, including its age, the season, time, and the environment around it. Then participants drew a picture of their imagery.

Most workshops unfolded in the following way: a warm-up activity; yarning; lunch; a main art-making activity; and yarning again to conclude the workshop. Critically, we deviated from this structure according to the shifting preferences of participants. Yarning about the artworks (always a choice) included verbal and written communication concerning the images. Silence was a welcomed form of yarning that allowed respect and involved listening to what was not said. But the silence also acknowledged the artworks as speaking – or as actively participating in the research. Allowing artworks to speak to their creators or to other group members through silence reflects methodological enactment of a relational ontology. Artworks were photographed at the conclusion of each workshop and the sessions were audio recorded. I kept a visual–verbal diary for each site and encouraged co-facilitators and participants to do the same. I had no access to their journals, emphasising partial access to knowledge.

Yarning about the method took place during most sessions, providing valuable feedback that enabled changes to the ways future sessions were carried out. Regular meetings with the co-facilitators enabled two-way educational and supportive supervision. The method as slow, modest, vulnerable, diverse, shifting, and uncertain, was evident in that – except for respect for each other, the space, and the art materials – nothing was sacred, nothing set in stone, and no change made was permanent. Figure 1 depicts the Art Yarning method.

Method for Knowledge Synthesis

Figure 1. The Art Yarning method.

Innovative forms of data collection and analysis, as well as dissemination of research results within cross-cultural research, have been encouraged in literature on decolonising methodologies (Smith 1999; Hall and Kulig 2004; Liamputtong 2008). Art Yarning is grounded in relational understandings of knowledge production, where knowledge is constructed in complex, multilayered, and continuous ways. Therefore, a modification of thematic analysis, in contrast to approaches that present new knowledge as independent, definite, and singular, took place in the following ways:

To reconstruct the relational environment of the Art Yarning sessions in the process of thematic knowledge synthesis, I listened to sessions’ recordings whilst indwelling² in the corresponding artworks. In the research write-up, I have regularly differentiated between the meanings participants gave to their Art Yarnings, and my understanding of those Art Yarnings as a witnessing researcher-participant. I have relayed new knowledge verbally and visually to Elders and hosting organisations for feedback and approval, to reflect-in-action and minimise an ‘ethnocentric interpretation’ of findings (Adamson and Donovan 2002).

The most challenging methodological aspect was the question of how to develop thematic analysis (as an exploration of commonalities) without suggesting, viewing, or presenting the experiences of participants as overly similar or even identical. Here, I found it useful to think of commonalities not as defined categories or themes – and still less as ‘codes’ – but rather as imagined soft-edged spaces, along which the participants have travelled, taking different pathways that represent their selves and their relations to others.

I have discerned the soft-edged spaces of commonality that appeared throughout participants’ Art Yarning expressions as including:

• Messy Resistance;

• Country – a bond in presence and absence;

• Dot painting – a messy stereotype;

• Whiteness.

These spaces are governed by an overarching space I have termed The Messy Whole Self. For the non-Indigenous participants in the program, including myself, an added space appeared, which I termed Adaptation. Below, and along these lines, I provide examples of participants’ Art Yarnings, followed by brief storytelling as knowledge synthesis.

Knowledge Synthesis: Examples

Figure 2. (a) ‘The Masks We Are’ (outer mask), Malachi (2016). (b) ‘The Masks We Are’ (inner mask), Malachi (2016).

‘The flower, wave, palm tree – they represent the other side of my culture […] it’s on the outside so they’ll know that I’m not just Aboriginal – I’m Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. This is meant to be like a Bible, so like the spiritual side of things, and this is the other spiritual – the cultural spiritual. They are little mookies (Malachi 2016).

Using standard blank masks and wet plaster bandages, participants built up unique masks. We then asked participants to visually represents aspects of their inner and outer selves on the masks. These Art Yarnings proved a significant space for the emergence of what I term the Messy Whole Self – Indigenous identities complex and diverse in their make-up, and wholly embodied.

In her mask, Malachi (2016) depicts and demands recognition as an Aboriginal and a Torres Strait Islander woman³ by halving the lower part of the outer mask (Figure 2a). One half includes dot painting and frangipani as Aboriginal signifiers; the other half depicts a bird, and an ocean with darker blue spots as Torres Strait Islands. The visual design is not a division of identity, but is a relational representation of it when we view oceans and birds as things that connect parts together. This relationality is further emphasised in the inner mask (Figure 2b) where mookies and the New Testament coexist to create the whole of Malachi’s (2016) spiritual identity. Mookies in Yorta Yorta language are ancestor spirits of deceased persons which appear to protect grieving families from being harmed by evil spirits (Burrinja Cultural Centre n.d.). Here, the Art Yarning method has given rise to multileveled expressions – of grief, of engagement with cultural beliefs surrounding grief, and in expression of the spiritual dimensions of Malachi’s (2016) identity. Malachi (2016)expresses resistance to colonialism through the survival of her Indigenous identity, yet this identity includes western Christianity, giving her response a sense of messy resistance.

Figure 3. (a) ‘The Masks We Are’, Paul (2016). (b) ‘The Masks We Are’, Lisa (2016). (c) ‘The Masks We Are’, Kristie (2016).

‘I painted the Aboriginal flag and dots because when you look at me, I look Aboriginal. I am proud to be an Aboriginal but sometimes it makes me sad or angry because that is what people see when they look at me and they judge me by my skin colour’ (Paul 2016).

‘I used dots to stitch my broken emotions’ (Lisa 2016).

‘I use dots because I see myself as an Aboriginal artist’ (Kristie 2016).

The concept of the Messy Whole Self reflects more than the influences of western lifeways on Indigenous identity formation. Although dots are visual symbols associated with specific Indigenous Mobs, dot painting has become a signifying feature of Desert Art as an intercultural product,⁴ which in turn has expanded the status of dots to represent a challenged but lingering notion of ‘authentic Aboriginality’ (Perkins and Fink 2000; Short 2012; Gibson 2013). Participants adapted dot painting as an imposed signifier of Aboriginality (consciously and unconsciously) and used it in meaningful, innovative ways to enhance and express both the individual self and a collective Indigenous Australian identity.

Red, yellow, and white dots join an Aboriginal flag to frame an ‘Aboriginal-looking’ face; these dots resemble beads and a pendant necklace that extends Paul’s (2016) Wiradjuri/Wemba-Wemba identity to Pan-Aboriginality (Figure 3a). Paul (2016) manipulates the dots as an intercultural product to express an identity that simultaneously feels judged, proud, and related to all Indigenous Australians. Lisa (2016), an Adnyamathanha woman, turns the dots into a healing tool (Figure 3b). The creative process enables her to map out and relate previously estranged parts of the self. Kristie (2016) (unknown Country) adapts dot painting as a ‘telltale’ of Indigeneity in its entirety. Placing an abstract landscape on one cheek and a dot painting on the other gives the latter equal significance to the former as an identity marker of Country (Figure 3c). The use of dots in the Art Yarnings of these research actors suggests a certain collective identity across the broad space of more definitive and localised Aboriginal identities, which along with its intercultural history, makes dot painting a messy stereotype.

Figure 4. ‘The Waterways We Are’, Kristie (2016).

South Australia – Nangwarry

‘My place is made up ‘cause I never been there but I feel connected to it […] my mum was brought up by her mother – non-Indigenous, not knowing anything about her culture so that’s what I have been dedicated my life to – learning about mum’s peoples.

Murray Bridge – a lot of my people are from there […] I don’t know ‘cause I have never been there […] I have hunted down half of them through Facebook but I don’t really know how it looks like […] all I can picture when it comes to my people is the Murray River and the bridge – maybe about to cross over to my mum, my ancestors […] the bridge is me being lost, trying to find my way back to my people. If I have children one day, they won’t know about their history so it’s my duty to connect with this, to belong somewhere.

Will they accept me? They might turn their backs to me […] will they allow me to be part of them?’ (Kristie 2016).

Figure 5. ‘The Waterways We Are’, Candy (2016).

Unnamed Waterway on Gunditjmara Country

‘I’m fascinated with this creek. Just read back on history of Gunditjmara peoples and that is where our Mob used to go when we were banished from Portland [ … ] every now and again I sneak there just to sit by this waterway [ … ] When I have a bit of a shit day I just want this space and I feel calm and relaxed [ … ] It’s a private place so I’m kind of trespassing but I feel so connected to this place. People will come to this place with blood on their faces being chewed off by dogs. This yarn just got stacked with me [ … ] so much for us to know’ (Candy 2016).

The Art Yarning process revealed multiple and complex meanings of Country in the experience of participants, with a governing commonality of a bond between Country and identity, which exists in both presence and absence. It was important to Elders involved that participants become familiar with the importance of waterways to their Indigenous identity. On Gunditjmara, we visited the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape with Aunty Maude and learned about the sophisticated aquaculture network for channelling kooyang (short-finned eel) into holding ponds. Kristie (2016), who had just embarked on a search for her Country, harnessed the visit and the creative process to enact the bond with her Country in absence (Figure 4). The image of her about to cross a bridge over water powerfully captures the embarking of a both painful and exciting search for her Country. For Candy (2016), a Gunditjmara woman, the image captures the difficult paradoxical state of belonging and trespassing (Figure 5). The connection she speaks of is evident in the harmony created by the blue flowing water, the green trees and hillsides, as well as the sun, blue sky, and birds. This bond with Country triumphs over the coloniser’s legal understanding of land ownership, as there is no depiction of the latter in the image.

Figure 6. ‘The Islands We Are’, Paul (2016).

‘Most of it is sort of natural. There’s couple of shelters there […] one at the bottom […]it’s more a place to camp. So, there’s always a place to camp – you guys are welcome. There is always water for everyone, food for everyone. There is plenty of room for nature in my life. And people yeah. And water, and the yellow part in the centre is a beach, sort of accessible from all sides […] there’s fish, there’s whales. Totally surrounded by a beach so I’m accessible from all sides. I like to think I’m a person that anyone can come to and say something.

It’s all about Country – I guess I’m nothing without it. In the last 3 years as I’m getting older, I sort of feel disconnected from Country – Was there last year for a funeral. When I see what happened to the land it’s kind of breaks my heart […].

You get engrossed in it, like the mask […] yeah. It’s not finished. You really get in touch with your feelings when you’re doing it. I can really see what’s that done to me. It made me look at what I’m doing in a sense that it made me isolate myself and become an island’ (Paul 2016).

Figure 7. (a) ‘The Country/ies We Are’, Lisa (2016). (b) ‘The Country/ies We Are’, Lisa (2016).

‘Adnyamathanha Country […] means Rock People. Flinders Rangers. I added desert flowers, so the fires are good fires. They burn the seeds, so they can flourish. Beautiful flowers, plant life. I miss home. I need to go back for another visit. I need some more healing. It’s my choice to live here, away from my family; they drive me crazy. When I moved here with my younger son, I was welcomed with open arms. Not like Horsham. I was never accepted there by the Elders themselves. They just stuck in their ways, yeah, they’re not open to outsiders’ black fellas. Racism happens from within not just from white people.

The Aboriginal hands mean hands on Country […] I like going back home. I need to get the healing done […] take me shoes off and put me feet in the sand and soil. It’s all the healing process, it’s fantastic […] yeah, and we eat traditional food, so it’s lovely, which I don’t do here but I should’ (Lisa 2016).

The art therapy tool, My Island, proved a particularly powerful integrative tool for participants to enact their bond with Country. By tracing participants’ whole bodies onto thick cardboard paper, the islands created depict a visual emergence of self and Country.

Paul’s (2016) island echoes the relationality of humans and non-humans through the submersion of green and yellow selves, and through one hand that reaches to the sun, moon, and clouds, and another that reaches the water (Figure 6). The yellow and green selves are each at once Paul (2016) and his Country.⁵ Both the harming of Country and the passing of a fellow Indigenous man are felt within his being, and so the place to grieve and heal, the shelter, is not a house but the coming together of Country and Indigenous Australian, visually depicted through the placement of a body of water with an accessible beach where Paul’s (2016) heart is. Separation is not possible because the properties of anything are only possible, and can only be seen, through interaction with the whole.

Lisa (2016) also speaks of Country as identity in her depiction of Adnyamathanha Country (Figure 7a and 7b). The image is part of a collective depiction of Countries made on a canvas 1.5 by 2.5-meters-long by participants on Wadawurrung Country. While the literal meaning of the collective name Adnyamathanha is Rock People, Lisa (2016) depicts relationality through rocks surrounding land-management fires set around desert flowers, and through hands with life sources (a circle with an inner circle and outer circles) connecting each finger by circular lines. Hands-on Country depicts a bond with Country in both presence and absence – physical being on Adnyamathanha Country as a source of healing, and the carrying of an Adnyamathanha identity whilst living on Wadawurrung Country. Listening to her yarn, along with the placement of hands on top of a green landscape (as opposed to the rocky desert of Adnyamathanha Country) invites an additional reading of hands-on Country that speaks of both the damage of displacement to a sense of identity (taken off one’s Country and rejection by Indigenous Australians on other Countries) and a cross-Countries bond through Pan-Aboriginality.

Figure 8. (a) ‘The Families We Are’, Carpy (2016). (b) ‘The Families We Are’, Carpy (2016).

Figure 9. ‘The Families We Are’, Kym (2016).

‘From the start: [red love heart] it is me reading stories to C [child; red circle]. And then to J, then to M [grandchildren], and I’ll stop reading. Carpy (anchor) because he likes fishing, C (pushbike) – he always wants to ride bikes. B (car), he likes cars, A when he was at kindie, he loved being in the sandpit. E, the phone frick-anybody has a phone, she has to have it. And I’ll say this is me again. Heart is all right, then it got broken and up to get fixed. And that’s that. I just feel a big hole, I’ll say. Until it fills up, that then and when that comes good, I’ll be good’ (Kym 2016).

Traditionally, the art therapy tool Draw Your Family uses visual metaphors to depict one’s family members, as a safer and more accessible pathway for visually expressing, and working through, difficult familial relationships. We modified this tool by asking participants to depict all their significant human and non-human relationships. The couple whose artworks are featured, Kym (2016), a Wathaurong woman, and Carpy (2016), a man of European descent, depicted their lived experiences with the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander child removal policy, and its application by the Department of Health and Human Services Victoria (DHS), as exercises of ‘white possessive logic’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015). Carpy (2016) describes his family, each member depicted within a different object: ‘I’m trying to bring them all together because we have lost them’ (Figure 8a). The image depicts entangled coloured spaces to reflect familial bonds, and empty holes among them to express disturbance of the family net and the emptiness this brings. In Figure 8b, the same colours are used to metaphorically present the virtues Carpy (2016) sees in each member. Kym is the matriarch, evident through a tree that is the only metaphor grounded to the edge of the paper.

The strength to fight for the care of their grandchildren that Carpy (2016) attributes to Kym (2016) is evident in her artwork (Figure 9), through the closeness of the familial metaphors, the line that connects them together, and the physically largest metaphor of Kym (2016) as a love heart. Yet, the creative process enables Kym (2016) to also express a vulnerable, aching, and broken heart – a significant expression for someone who sees herself, and whom others see, as ‘the strong one’. Although sitting apart, the anchor appears in both Carpy’s (2016) and Kym’s (2016) images – a powerful moment where a strong relationship is expressed through an identical visual expression.

Figure 10. ‘The Families We Are’, Bradley (2016).

‘This is my one, so basically issues that’s going on with me. That’s my family – my farm in Werribee […] family in Cairns. That’s me neighbour that I’m close to. That’s the football club that got me out of alcohol and drug use. And the clinic in BADAC, and the BADAC community. J****’s brother passed away, so we went up there and I’ve seen her family. When White people came over they wiped a whole tribe out, so I was a bit afraid, but they took me in […] they didn’t really look at me weird, you know, but took in the family, and that’s why I got a lot of respect for Aboriginal people […] Aboriginal people are one big family for me, more than what my family has done. (Bradley 2016).

Figure 11. ‘The Creation Stories We Are’, Anna (2016).

‘it’s not that I don’t believe in Indigenous stories and everything but, being a Christian and not hearing stories of how things were made from you guys’ point of views, to hearing that God made everything … it doesn’t grasp in my head how things can be made differently to how I was taught.

Oh yes! That is me and my family. Yes, I guess I am protecting my son, don’t I? Oh yes! That is me and my family. Yes, I guess I am protecting my son, don’t I?’ (Anna 2016).

For Bradley (2016), a man of European descent, the importance of Aboriginal peoples and Aboriginal communities is so great that he depicts himself through the colours of the Aboriginal flag at the center of the image (Figure 10). Further, three of the four metaphors he has used to depict family represent Indigenous people and places – BADAC, the home he shares with his Yarrabah wife, and her community on Yarrabah Country. His yarning conveys this sense of importance and culminates in viewing all Aboriginal people as his family. While the creative process illuminated Bradley’s prior finding of family in Aboriginal community, the particular instance provided Anna with a moment of sudden important realisation, triggered by the image and its parts.

Following directions from Elders to share the Gunditjmara creation story of Budj Bim, we asked participants to create their own visual interpretation of it. As her yarning shows, Anna (2016), a woman of European descent, found the process challenging, since it seemed to contradict her Christian beliefs about the creation of the world. Anna’s (2016) moment of realisation partly emerged in an earlier warm-up activity, where participants were asked to represent their feelings on the day using the art therapy directive: if you were a cake, what cake would you be today? Anna (2016) drew a layered sponge cake with a missing piece and shared painful feelings of missing a child who was removed from her care. When yarning about her depiction of the Budj Bim story, the revealing of the ancestral being in the landscape and his intrinsic part of Gunditjmara people’s identity transformed into Anna’s family as depicted by the parents and child on top of the mountain (Figure 11). Anna (2016) did not consciously create the three figures; they emerged during yarning to help her realise the importance of her family and her role in caring for her second child.

Unlike appropriation, adaptation does not claim ownership of Indigenous knowledges, but expresses a willingness to make changes to our own ways of knowing-being-doing, through experiencing more beneficial ways. Bradley (2016) does not claim Aboriginality; he seeks a life-path of connectivity to Aboriginal peoples because it is Indigenous Australia on individual, community, and organisational levels that has fulfilled his need for belonging.

Anna (2016) accepts the intrinsic relationship of Gunditjmara people with ancestral beings, because by learning and engaging with the creation story, she has arrived at a critical understanding of motherhood. Other non-Indigenous participants spoke of how marriage to an Indigenous person, and life in Indigenous communities, has led them to adopt and live by the philosophical view that everything/everyone is an entity with which one shares a reciprocal relationship of care. The adaptation of Indigenous ontological, epistemological, methodological, and axiological research positions is also reflected through the integrated method of Art Yarning, the active and ongoing collaborative nature of the program, and the recognition and empowerment of the non-human.

Figure 12. ‘The Island We Are’, Elinor (2016).

‘I love working big and moving my whole body, not just my hands. The dark blue water, especially on the right side of my body, which is kind of like my back, my past – these are the unsafe areas. Grief, trauma and loss I have experienced. And the yellow and black bits on that side of the island, I guess these represent no access. So, I guess on one hand, I find it hard to talk about past pains, but then again, I’m painting it and doing it, you know. So maybe it gets easier with time and doing art […] (Elinor 2016).

My Island (Figure 12) depicts a relational understanding of my mind–body-spirit. The externalisation of past trauma, grief, and loss depicted through dark water on the right of the body enables a safe expression of hard-to-verbalise feelings. Intensified presence of colours and shapes in the head signals the then dominance of the mind. The oval-shaped lines within lines express a cyclical relationship with diverse feelings. While the eclectic presence of colours, shapes, and tones speaks of relationality within oneself (body–mind-spirit), the coloured shapes across the water and the spilling of one leg and a side of the upper body into the water represent relationality with the environment. Again, these were not conscious artistic decisions in the process of art-making; their meanings emerged during yarning.

Summary

The Art Yarning method has proven an effective and powerful mode of inter- and intra-communication. The centralisation of visual expression in the Art Yarning program has enabled the communication of complex and multilayered meanings that are hard to achieve in words alone. The visual metaphors have enabled safe access to challenging parts of the self, and a visualisation of relationships with human and non-human others, and art-making proved successful in quieting the mind, promoting calmness, and healing.

The positioning of the method as shifting, uncertain, slow, modest, vulnerable, and diverse, reflects the agency of communities and participants in shaping and reshaping the method as they saw fit. These characteristics also reflect a view of social research methods as only capable of delivering situated, incomplete, temporary knowledge – a valuable and humbling position that recognises and respects boundaries around knowledge production.

The method works well in the complex cultural space where this research is situated, because it reflects and enacts relationality as a conceptual meeting place of Indigenous Australian and western ontologies. The method respects Indigenous Australian relational ontologies through: acknowledgment and engagement with Country as an active non-human research actor from which cultural knowledges emerge; and by fostering ongoing, honest engagement with the hosting organisations, Elders, and KIPs. Participants have integrated multiple narratives of identity, influenced by both the cultural and personal dimensions of the self, and have enacted those stories visually and verbally. At the same time, assumptions about the agency of the images, art materials, and spaces have fitted well with beliefs in the presence of agency in everything – human and non-human – and those beliefs which enable participants to express and communicate with other non-human things around them, particularly Country.

Muecke (2004) and Birch (2007) challenge non-Indigenous researchers to adapt to aspects of Indigenous Australian knowledges through the development of connections with the land and its First Peoples, and through immersion in intellectual exchange. This imperative illuminates the power of Art Yarning, insofar as the method prioritises relationality, and promotes respect and appreciation of Indigenous participants’ knowledge systems, their lived experience, and their creative visual expression.

Rather than offering tokenistic engagement with Indigenous Australian cultures, these Art Yarning experiences were opportunities that unsettled presumptions – where non-Indigenous participants could experience uncomfortable spaces from which to extend acknowledgment of Indigenous peoples, cultures, and histories, from the conceptual to the embodied. In turn, Indigenous participants felt empowered through the centralisation of their ontologies in the relational Art Yarning space.

This research has explored lived experiences of participation in an integrated visual/verbal method of relational engagement and self-expression, and has asked what kinds of knowledge – and, perhaps, what kinds of transformation – might be possible when this method is explored. The knowledge synthesis reveals that representations of Indigenous Australian identities became the overall focus of the Art Yarning experiences. The Art Yarning process has revealed different, often apparently contradictory, terrains within each self, which take and reject, adapt, modify, and manipulate various elements of western ways of knowing-being-doing, whilst continuing to hold strongly to Indigenous knowledge systems.

Far from reflecting fragmentation or problematic identity formation, I associate the emergence of this messiness in part with the impact of colonialism, but more with a contemporary expression of relationality in Indigenous Australian philosophies and identities, and as an expression of strength, resilience, and wholeness. The notion of wholeness-through-mess in representations of Indigenous identities does not dismiss the urgent need for justice, nor does it undermine the challenges the Indigenous participants face considering continued subjugation. It does, however, illuminate and celebrate the strengths, diversity, and richness of Indigenous identities – a portrayal of unequal representations across governmental, structural, and street communications in Australia.

Research Implications

There are several implications that arise from the Art Yarning method as shifting, uncertain, slow, modest, vulnerable, and diverse, only capable of delivering incomplete, temporary knowledge. First, this sort of methodological approach gives Indigenous communities the freedom to create their own meanings from project participation. Second, Indigenous organisations and participants have been able to develop their own skills for future expressions of Art Yarning. The program develops research skills in the community, combining Indigenous knowledges with academic theoretical framing and methodologies. Third, the method reduces imbalances in power relations. The engagement with a universal practice in a word-free space during art-making minimises the dominance of one worldview over another, and commitment of the researcher as participant blurs research roles. Further, the characteristics of the method requires the researcher to relinquish control and employ co-learning attitudes.

Engagement with visual communication can be challenging or simply undesired due to the potential intensity and speed in which artwork communicates to the art maker about the self. Art Yarning requires researchers to engage in experiential learning of art therapy that demands an emotional investment. This long-term, qualitative method lacks generalisability of findings. It centres on individuals’ lived experiences and thus prevents essentialisation of Indigenous peoples and cultures.

Art Yarning can have an impact on shaping theory and practice at the interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous research methodologies. Engaging the fields of art therapy and Indigenous knowledges creates a new field that can be developed further to enrich decolonial research methods. However, it is the method behind the method that is most significant here; the outcomes of the Art Yarning methodology in this iteration suggest that respectful openness to Indigenous ways of knowing-being-doing potentially creates pathways for cross-disciplinary, cross-organisational, intercultural, and multidirectional learning that shifts the parameters of Eurocentric academic research. The methodology of Art Yarning also has implications for best practice in Indigenous research, reflecting a case study in working with Indigenous communities to successfully bring them into the academic research community and, in so doing, to develop the practice of the academy.

Art Yarning, and the values that inform it, is a method that researchers from a wide range of disciplines can engage with, including in spaces of art practice, health and wellbeing, sociology, and linguistics. Art Yarning can also be applied to other situations where Indigenous communities exist in trauma, and ‘therapy’ can here play a role, particularly through supporting self-reflective identity building within the supportive relations of localised community.

Critically, unlike appropriation, adaptation to aspects of Indigenous knowledges suggests the ability to imagine oneself in an Indigenous space of knowing-being-doing without claiming that identity. The ‘adaptation space’ found in this project implies that the Art Yarning method is suitable for research that aims to explore the benefits of learning from Indigenous Australian knowledge systems where the target population is non-Indigenous.

Art Yarning suggests that the call for the inclusion of art in a polyphonic process of harmonisation in Indigenous scholarship (Arbon 2008; Martin 2008) can extend successfully to Indigenous individuals and communities as a healing tool, a form of expression and communication, and as a means through which to reflect on, and further develop, relational coordinates of identity. The creative process is one possible space through which we arrive at infra-critique; where worlds emerge collectively; where distinctions such as human and non-human, living and non-living disappear; and positions of knower-observers dissolve (Verran 2014). Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians can share this space to learn about the self, the other and the spaces in-between.

Declaration

All participants in this research project have given written consent for their ‘art yarnings’ to be published by the author. Nearly all participants have chosen to have their full names stated in this article, and in some cases, this open sharing of stories is seen by these participants as part of their relational responsibilities and accountabilities. I have assigned pseudonyms and omitted name/s of Country/ies for those who preferred confidentiality.

Acknowledgements

My eternal gratitude goes to the participants, Wurundjeri, Gunditjmara, and Wathaurong Countries, and to the Art – the materials and processes – for being, knowing, and doing the relational with me. I acknowledge Winda Mara and BADAC Corporations, Eileen Alberts-Aunty Maude, Edward Alfred Lovett-Uncle Ted, and Gunditjmara and Wathaurong Countries as collaborators on the Artful Mob research project, and whose generous parting of knowledge had expanded myself in significant and permanent ways.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

RMIT’s HREC, approval number 19758.

Notes on contributors

Elinor Assoulin

Dr Elinor Assoulin is an academic and an art therapist whose research interest concerns the intersection between art, race, identity, and visual pathways for expression, communication, and research.

Notes

1 Through her Quandamooka ontology, Martin assigns the term ‘knowing-being-doing’ to an Indigenist research framework, emphasising the relationship between different activities within this trio.

2 Indwelling involves focused gazing with the purpose of allowing deeper levels of meaning to surface (Douglas and Moustakas 1985).

3 Names of Country/ies are not disclosed.

4 The origin of dot painting can be traced to trade with missions in the 1930s (Morphy 1991; Myers 2002), but its formulation as an inter-cultural product began in the 1970s through collaboration between a group of displaced Pintupi, Luritja, Arrernte, Anmatyerre, and Warlpiri men in Papunya – a government-initiated assimilation project – and a hierarchy of governmental and art world representatives.

5 Paul does not specify which Country he refers to here.