Be-yond becoming: the shared features of art-making and constructing a narrative of the imagined future

Both art-making and creating a ‘Narrative of the Imagined Future’ call on the imagination to conceive a finished object before beginning its construction. Both processes open a way into the unknown, where one searches for what could become real. In this paper I employ an auto-ethnographic approach to demonstrate the similarities between art-making and the writing of a self-narrative, referencing my double portrait, ‘Be-yond Becoming’ (which draws on van Eyck’s ‘The Arnolfini Portrait’), and the circumstances behind its generation. Narratives are powerful vehicles. As we tell the story of who we want to become we set ourselves to live out that story. The virtual is actualised and the imagined is made real. In this instance, I outline how a rupture in my self-narrative allowed another self-narrative to emerge. Art-practice guided me out of an episode of depression as I replaced my self-narrative of being a failed teacher with a new self-narrative, that of becoming an artist.