Cirrus@Austlit

'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.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'An autoethnography of a marriage and its demise, this work relies on the reflective modality of the lyric essay to consider the role of memory in love, heartbreak, and reconciliation. Examining two characters from different cultures whose ancestors fought for opposing sides during World War II, this story wonders if their marriage was doomed by history and the silences of intergenerational shame that emerged in Germany particularly during the post-war occupation period. Using the methodology of the witnessing imagination this essay also argues that creative writing gives shape to traumatic historical events and allows remarkable access to complex processes of recovery. Two poets—Kenneth Slessor and Joseph Brodsky—are employed as metaphoric soldiers fighting over the terrain of memory alongside the ‘witness’ author, interrogating personal issues about the on-going heartbreak of a failed marriage which come to symbolise larger concerns of social and political reconciliation. The notion of memory’s integrity to acts of reconciliation is explored through storytelling which relies on the ethical foundations of bibliotherapy as a creative practice devoted to healing trauma. This account of love and its subsequent heartbreak in a post-traumatic, ‘occupied space’ suggests that lyrical interventions afford distinctive opportunities for enhanced understandings to emerge.' (Abstract)