Abstract

Within this thesis I share the story of my entangled relationalities with my great nana, Dorothy, who passed away when I was three years old. Dorothy was a brilliant artist, and I grew up surrounded by her paintings that hang on the walls of my family home. Looking through these painted portals into Dorothy’s imagination throughout my life has greatly inspired my journey into becoming an artist, researcher, and teacher. Twenty-three years after her death, shortly before I began my graduate studies in art education, my family unexpectedly discovered a box of Dorothy’s archival journals, sketches, and photographs, within which she has documented her own various artistic processes. Within this inquiry, I explore Dorothy’s archival artistic processes through creating my own, expanding upon her past moments within my present pedagogic experiences, collectively weaving together a new story that defies boundaries, and enfleshes entanglements of space, time, and matter. As such, this research unfolds from the middle, through layers, rather than chapters, where past and future meet in the presence of becoming. This thesis both explores artistic processes and is composed as an artistic process in itself, rippling outwards from the present moment through various diffractive dimensions (Barad, 2007). Waves and undercurrents of meaning become increasingly dynamic as I investigate the pedagogic value of process through mapping an artistic process directly into the form and content of my inquiry.