Be-yond Becoming: The Shared Features of Art-making and Constructing a Narrative of the Imagined Future

ABSTRACT

Both art-making and creating a ‘Narrative of the Imagined Future’ call on the imagination to conceive a finished object before beginning its construction. Both processes open a way into the unknown, where one searches for what could become real. In this paper I employ an auto-ethnographic approach to demonstrate the similarities between art-making and the writing of a self-narrative, referencing my double portrait, ‘Be-yond Becoming’ (which draws on van Eyck’s ‘The Arnolfini Portrait’), and the circumstances behind its generation.

Narratives are powerful vehicles. As we tell the story of who we want to become we set ourselves to live out that story. The virtual is actualised and the imagined is made real. In this instance, I outline how a rupture in my self-narrative allowed another self-narrative to emerge. Art-practice guided me out of an episode of depression as I replaced my self-narrative of being a failed teacher with a new self-narrative, that of becoming an artist.

KEYWORDS:

• Imagination
• narrative
• future
• becoming

Acknowledgements

This paper is an extension of a presentation at the conference for The Sacred and the Arts (2015) and part of a PhD under the supervision of Dr Elaine Lindsay and Associate Professor Michael Griffith.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Debra Phillips is completing a PhD at Australian Catholic University. Her research project, Narratives of the Imagined Future, uses diary data to consider how a preferred self-narrative creates opportunities to move away from an unproductive self-narrative. She is a practising artist with a background in education and special needs education.

Elaine Lindsay is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at Australian Catholic University. She is the author of Rewriting God: Spirituality in Contemporary Australian Women’s Fiction, editor of The Diaries of Barbara Hanrahan, and co-editor of Preachers, Prophets and Heretics: Anglican Women’s Ministry.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.