Scribble me this… Drawing practice reimaging Australian nationalistic iconography

Scribble Me This... draws analogous relationships between methods of drawing practice, and its display, in an ongoing personal enaction of national identity in the Australian example. As practice-led drawing research, it employs studio and exhibition methodologies to re-inscribe and reconfigure national iconographies in an ongoing artistic gesture. This ongoing model reflects a national identity that was, and continues to be, invented - continually changing as it incorporates a diverse set of constituent perspectives over time. Historical, social and political considerations inform the research outcomes. Traditions of national imagery from sources such as propaganda, publishing, art, nature, news media and advertising are re-imaged using strategies of re-configuration, conspicuous omission and purposeful open-endedness. Graphic approaches, including the predominant use of common writing tools (pens), and the open aesthetics of scribbled and unfinished, purposefully complicate the fixedness of an extant national symbology, 'redrawn' through banal personal expressions and interpretations of the national self-image. The research draws, in theory and practice, on Australian colonial and Federalist art tropes, philosophies of national identity, and the contemporary practices of artists who address national critique. The methodological and conceptual spaces employed in the research-making of the project are re-enacted in the open and divergent installation of it, and the viewing encounter. The project seeks to re-position identity construction from something received to something personally enacted and renewable, drawing on subjective experiences and histories. It manifests experiences of creativity, exhibition and agency, working to vivify national representations as speculative encounters that look forward while acknowledging the past, while remaining open in a continuum of revision and reiteration. New knowledge is demonstrated through informed responses to the ontology of Australian national identity through, and in relation to, the drawing processes used throughout the research.