How She Becomes Herself: The Artist as the Daughter of the Artist

Abstract

This essay highlights aspects of my childhood in 1970s Toronto, Ontario (Canada), growing up as the daughter of an artist, and the ways in which I came to make ‘thinking’ as an artist and spiritually engaged education researcher. Reflecting on my multiple visits to the recent retrospective, multi-artist exhibition entitled WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Butler, 2007 - exhibited at Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, 2009), I realize how I am embedded within a lineage of women artists –how the tactile stimulus of viewing art embodies whole histories (her-stories) for me. As the daughter of an artist, and being a mother, artist and art educator myself, I cannot, or do not separate artistic praxis from the development of theoretical frameworks emerging within my research and life writing.