Empowerment, Healing, and Identity: Intersectional Feminist Methodology in Contemporary Creative Practice. Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ): Feminist creative practice research: methods, motives and meaning

Creative practice using Intersectional Feminism as a methodology can serve as a way to decolonialise feminist methods and empower creative practitioners. Using practitioner reflection, engaging in critical self-reflexivity, I consider how to use sound, performance, and ritual methods to create a visual lexicon for understanding overlapping identities and experiences. Kimberley Crenshaw continues to define Intersectional Feminism “as a prism for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other” (Steinmetz, 2020, para 2). This approach to feminist creative practice research takes a subjective view, bringing the artist’s personal, emotional history and narrative to light. In my creative practice, I explore my culturally diverse background, in the context of tensions between gender, race and sexuality. Using sound, performance and ritual as cultural and feminist process and political tools, I produce feedback loops of my own voice and artefacts traditionally used in ritual practices. Making noise as aural contamination and noise pollution, and as a way to acknowledge and consolidate my own existence in the face of colonisation and patriarchal culture, I occupy space to be seen and heard, as the feminist ‘other’. Through creative practice, I aim to expand upon these intersectional frameworks and use them as a space for cathartic healing that empowers me personally and creatively.