Exploring time and place: An investigation of the influence of place on creative identity.

This practice-based research project investigates the influence of place on a visual artist’s creative work. The focus of the investigation is based on my lived experience as a German-Australian teenager in the small regional town of Goroka in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, where I lived with my family during my adolescence. The perspective this research explores is that of a non-Papua New Guinean teenager living in PNG during a period of rapid social and political change from early 1972 to early 1975, immediately prior to PNG’s emergence as an independent nation later in 1975; revisiting locations on recent times; and contemporary Australian experiences of ‘home’. Underpinned by a body of creative work that includes works of visual art based on adapted printmaking techniques and an artist book, the research examines the dynamic between place and creative identity. This thesis aims to establish that place attachment theory can provide a lens through which creative identity can be analysed.