Artists as reflective self-learners and cultural communicators: an exploration of the qualitative aesthetic dimension of knowing self through reflective practice in art-making

This article tells a story of how a group of women artists with a passion for the media of fibre came together and through individual and group reflective practices used the visual arts as a learning platform to negotiate social and cultural meanings and inform understandings of self. The epistemological basis of the arts and the imagery of vision to 'see' offered for these women a way to access their qualitative world and a platform upon which to negotiate constructs of self. For these women reflecting through imagery was an essential validating tool of self-understanding. Over a number of years they refined and developed individual and group reflective processes that informed their own cognitive mythologies and refined their art practices. The longitudinal study draws on 10 years of artistic practice by seven Australian women artists. It examines their art-making processes, concepts, symbolic meaning-making systems through image analysis and insights gained through being an active participant in their reflective discourses. The research reveals over time the artists refinement of intensions in meaning-making and the evolution of their aesthetic dimensions of self shaped using personal reflective practices. They engaged in new cultural discourses which actively contributed to an emergent cultural script and art-making which was ultimately emancipatory.