A canoe of many passengers

My time at the Cairns TAFE college was to tutor students in a series of woodblock printing workshops. The dynamic at the art school was very open and fluid in terms of students’ interplay between the visual arts and music departments. My approach to tutoring the medium was how I came up with the concept of the artwork, ‘A Canoe of many passengers’ which led me to co-operative ‘fono’ (meaning) for coming together with the students.
It was extremely open in terms of what each student would contribute, and given the diverse cultural dynamics from within, Pacific wide, it was amazing as the project evolved. The cross-cultural symbolisms and mythologies, the ‘canoe’ form simply as a metaphor, offered a foundation to the students for a visual language outside the wider dialogue it would offset. Artist’s statement 2004