Narrative identity and artistic narration - The story of adolescents' art

Journal/Book: J Mat Cult. 1997; 2: 6 Bonhill Street, London, England EC2A 4PU. Sage Publications Ltd. 219-239.

Abstract: By organizing and concretizing experiences, art is an effective means to construct identity. As a promoter of the reflexive project of the self, art is especially valuable for adolescents for whom negotiating life-style choices and generating mastery over circumstances of uncertainty and multiple choice is especially intense. This paper concerns narrative identity and the way it is constructed by Finnish adolescents via their accounts of their artistic activity and products. The stories regarding the pictures that they had once produced gradually opened up to a world of interpretations reflecting the adolescents' present circumstances. Thus, although indebted to the motifs in the concrete pictures, the stories reached out far beyond what could be seen in them. These stories reproduced conventional gender identities of girls being compassionate and boys being independent. However, the very process of making art had a counterbalancing effect as it provided them a relief from the very pressures of conforming to strict gender roles. Altogether I examine art and telling about it as a prop to the adolescents' ongoing identity-formation in which the two explicit 'others' promoting and challenging their self-reflexive projects were their own pictures and myself, as their interviewer and audience.

Note: Article Rantala K, Univ Helsinki, Dept Sociol Res, POB 18, Unioninkatu 35, FIN-00014 Helsinki, FINLAND

Keyword(s): adolescence; art; everyday life; gender; narrative; self-identity

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