51³Ô¹Ïapp

• For this task, you will plan, develop, and resolve a body of work relating to your specific creative interests.
• Throughout the six Studio Art Practice courses, you have experimented with a variety of techniques, media, and ideas, and become attuned to the various ways in which you can cultivate and explore your specific creative interests.
• By engaging with principles of practice-led research, you can actively connect your material and processual experiments with relevant ideas, contexts, and questions.
• You are encouraged to create a focused and cohesive body of work that draws on your experiences and insights from throughout the program, and to connect with your personal motivations for developing your practice.

In Constant Company works to negotiate the conflicts between my native Indian ethnicity and adopted Australian cultural identity that characterise my coming of age, through depictions of my body.

Through methods of watercolour and traditional henna, in In Constant Company I depict my body in pairs, undertaking various beauty tasks on myself, by myself. These pairs aim to narrate contrasts between Eurocentric beauty ideals that are learnt growing up in a predominantly white community, and an immutable ethnic body. Intimate in their actions and the bathroom space they are localised in, In Constant Company works to demonstrate the influence of such contradictions on the vulnerability of coming of age.

In Constant Company also recollects post-colonial theories of cultural identity. Here, an existence between cultures is explored as a fluid, indeterminate space, and identification with either culture waxes and wanes. Accordingly, In Constant Company explores how my self-empowerment can emerge through embracing this natural indeterminacy. With this work I use my coming of age as a tool to learn what it means to exist at the intersection of these cultures; determining self-empowerment in not having to commit fully to either, but rather by drifting in and out between the two.