Lotus trace III: hybrid cultural identity ~ a place to call home

Concepts of Identity, Culture and Home have become fluid in a contemporary globalised world. No longer can one hold a static assumption that these concepts are coherent and unitary. As a migrant, and later in life an artist, who has been living in Australia for thirty-five years, the question ‘Where are you from?’ always highlighted my ‘double-consciousness’ and provoked me to consider ‘who am I?’ My own acceptance of ‘otherness’ intensified my desire to explore through my creative arts research the concepts of self and belonging. My research perspective is drawn from a personal migration experience. It is a testimony to the psychological complexities experienced by people displaced to live in an unfamiliar culture and the affects this displacement has on ones sense of self. It considers theories that examine whether displaced people can ever be fully assimilated into a new and different culture and enquires whether ‘liminal space’ is a transitory or permanent location for the displaced person’s identity configuration? The research project reconnoitres and conceptualises a personal justification of hybrid/cultural identity configuration and metaphysical belongingness in a liminal space - a psychological space of ‘neither here nor there’ realised through sculptural installation. It explores and identifies an understanding of accumulating differences that mark the split, incomplete, hybrid positions in the fissure of liminality of those transnationals who are placed between two or more divided geographies, socio-graphics and cultural identities in the ‘in-between-ness’ and beyond. Through a critical analysis of six contemporary transnational artists whose experiences of displacement have shaped their sense of identity, belonging and their creative arts practice I find a common ground to convey my own insight and feelings of ‘being in the third space’. My research shows how the search for a concept of home, identity and belongingness informs the work of the artist and a longing to express these effects and understandings manifesting itself through a visual interpretation.