Student Spotlight: Art, Identity, and Narrative
For the Qualitative Research module, second-year English language and linguistics undergraduate Loryn Robinson interviewed student artists to learn more about how their stories reveal and construct their relationships with their artistic identities.
Why Artists/Creators?
Art is one of my hobbies, alongside writing, and it has been a consistent passion of mine for the past few years. As a result, when I heard about a creative society this year I quickly joined and found others like me. I wanted to see how our shared passion came through in our language and open the world of creators. I saw my Qualitative Research module as the perfect opportunity to explore a connection between my hobbies and my academic studies.
Eliciting Life Stories and Narratives
I choose to conduct interviews with questions that would elicit stories from the participants. These stories would be my data, I wanted to use stories as not only could I look at the language participants are using I may be able to investigate how they are ordering it. A key part of my methodology was keeping an open mind during both the interviews and analysis process, to ensure that I did not close myself off from other interesting and diverse avenues. However, during the interviews I felt nervous that I incorrectly believed that I was not eliciting any narratives, so I added a final question specifically about stories to directly draw upon narratives.
I spent a long time considering the questions I was going to ask, how I wanted to present myself as a researcher in the interviews, where to conduct the interviews. I eventually decided to present the interviews in a comfortable environment, and let the participants choose the location, and I chose to be engaging with my participants so I could potentially ask follow up questions. The questions I decided on were about the content they created, interaction with other creators, the development of their artistic style and how their content has changed over time. My original theme was going to be centred around ‘journey’ rather than ‘identity’ as I believed that I would elicit life stories.
In the end this didn’t happen, and I identified four key elements during my analysis of the stories my participants told me: how it feels to create content, the reflective self, artistic identities in progress, and negative artistic experience.
Key Terminology
Before I start explaining my findings, I want to define some artistic terminology that my participants used to describe themselves and their work.
‘Traditional art’ involves physical media, with its origins lying in prior centuries (EDEN Gallery, 2021). ‘Digital art’ refers to art that involves digital technology (EDEN Gallery, 2021) this does not include AI art, which functions as its own category as it is an amalgamation of artwork that is commonly pirated (Shaffi, 2003). ‘Content’ is a broad term and can refer to music, videos, writing and many different styles of art (Merriam-Webster, n.d.)
Traditional art (van Gogh, 1889) and digital art (Paredes, 2019)
The Feeling of Creating Content
Here's a quotation from one of my interviewees, Sage, when they spoke about how they feel when working on their creative projects:
“when you look at it, it just feels like you’re transported to like a dream, really”
The phrase ‘I feel like’ is reportedly beginning to have an alternative form, ‘it feels like’, this alternative is becoming specialised in metaphors found in Ontario English (Brook, 2020). Whilst the quote above does not match the alternative form exactly, as ‘just’ is inserted to intensify the message, the results are the same: Sage uses a metaphor to make sense of the familiar concept and feeling’s they have around artwork. The use of the ‘dream’ makes us think towards fantasy and the unreal. In this case it is linked to how Sage views artwork, as something that ‘transports’ them to a fantastical environment. Sage’s uses metaphor to present content and its creation as something otherworldly, which makes sense considering content in its bare form is simply freedom of expression.
The Reflective Self
The reflective self refers to how the narrator recognises their own constant state as a ‘self’ but recounts these events reflectively, and others the ‘self’ from the past experience as the narrator has undergone a change in their ‘self’ (Sandino, 2010).
Narrating the past from a reflective perspective
At another point in her story, Sage uses this style of narration to think about their development as an artist:
“I think it was sort of a group that like young me like at age four or something really wanted to draw in it was I think when I was a kid I wasn’t really connected to people as much around this stuff"
Before this quote, Sage had been detailing their A-level art experiences and how their “world view of what like artists looked like kind of shrunk a little bit after”, before commenting about how nice joining the artistic/creative society I am studying was. Whilst Sage makes it clear that their art teachers “were probably some of my favourite teachers in secondary school”, they reflected on this and thought back to the artistic community they wanted to be a part of when they were younger, a group of people who drew whatever they wanted.
Another creator, Skye, also reflects on their previous self’s sentiments around art and how they held back on drawing what the characters they liked. Skye began talking about how they had changed their content and remarked they were scared to draw characters they liked; I asked Skye why this was the case and Skye reflected on their previous self’s insecurities and what these insecurities resulted in, a fear about drawing the character wrong. Much like Sage, Skye also felt constricted in how they created content, fearing that what they drew would look ‘wrong’ and was fearful to even attempt drawing characters they liked. Skye’s reflected on this attitude and talked about how they didn’t care about the characters looking bad anymore and was going to draw the characters they liked because they liked them. This reflection shows how much they have changed as their opinion towards drawing their favourite characters flips on its head.
The reflective self helps create the self we recognise today as someone who recognises changes from our past ‘self’ and has grown from them. Art is not a subject that should be constricted, and content creation does not need to fear being wrong, rather we should embrace change and reflection so that we can become ourselves.
Artistic Identities in Progress
At this point I began to consider broad frameworks of stories, Labov & Waletzy (1967) provide a clear broad framework. Labov & Waletzy’s (1967) framework identifies six components of oral narratives: the abstract, orientation, complicating action, resolution, evaluation and a coda. However, the end of Olive’s narrative lacked a coda. Labov & Waletzky (1967) defined coda’s as additional elements that help narratives return to the present they are spoken in:
“if like I recognise oh I’m not very good at drawing hair I’ll put more effort into hair on my next drawing and work on that it’s like a repeated process of picking on what’s not great and working on that”
Olive appears to be focused on broadly answering a question within the context it was involved with. Essentially the beginning is not linked back to the present day, unlike in Labov & Waletzy’s (1967) framework. However, examples of the processes Olive have used and continues to use nowadays are connected back to the present. Olive uses their narrative structure to separate past ideas from processes that began in the past and are still utilised.
This is not the only area narrative structure where Labov & Waletzy’s (1967) work does not match the creators’ interviews. Ash, whilst following Labov & Waltezy’s (1967) narrative structure closely, chose to end their one of their narratives using the future tense, an aspect absent from Labov & Waltezy’s structure.
“I am planning to change my content so I can do art challenges so I have set a theme every week”
Ash references their plans for future content, describing their plans involving art challenges. Though the reason future tense was absent in Labov & Waletzy (1967) narrative structure could be due to the subject matter of near-death experiences, being unlikely to cause narratives about the future. The use of the future tense ‘I am planning’ helps to present content creation in a constant state of progress and change.
Ash and Olive show that progress is not something that can occur by staying the same. Olive continues to focus on improving aspects at a time, focusing on aspects they want to change and moving forward. Whilst Ash focuses on changing how they present their art online through art challenges to gain more reach or simply because they wish to change their art style again.
A Negative Artistic Experience
Clover’s interview stood out from the rest, potentially due to the questions stored on my laptop randomly closing and refusing to reopen, as a result, I had to ask the interview questions in the order I had remembered them. The other reason was due to Clover’s interview containing a more negative emotional pattern than other perspectives:
Interviewer - “Yeah and moved on to do digital art then”
Clover – “Basically I was forced to do like traditional realism like graphite and techno cause I was good at it but obviously it killed my passion”
I chose to investigate how Clover is representing themselves through their narratives through their use of impactful past-tense verbs, ‘forced’ and ‘killed’, to describe their experiences of art. Clover represents their ability to create traditional realism as good but this is contrasted with how the art is created, through pressure that ultimately ends with Clover’s passion for art being destroyed. There are not many things that can ‘force’ someone into an art style when they do not want to be, however, art GCSE tends to be one of them. As a result, I assumed art GCSE was forcing Clover into traditional realism, and this idea was not denied in my interview with them.
The idea that creators lose passion and care by being pressured into drawing a certain way by art teachers or other influences is scary. Creating content has always been about the freedom to do what you want and to have that stripped away in turn can strip away an artist’s passion.
Reflection
Language plays an important role in helping us to express our opinions on ourselves and our creations. More specifically, in these interviews the language these creators use help give us an insight into the world of artists, the good and the bad, the constant change, the reflection and the feeling of creating content. Anyone can be an artist - all you need is a pen and paper, and machines can never replicate the feeling you get the culmination of all your hard work is rewarded by your creation. But the stories my participants shared with me in this study showed me how our relationship with those identities can fluctuate over time. When we talk about who we are, we're also talking about who we have been, who we want to be, and sometimes who we don't want to become. Stories allow us to jump through time and link these parts of ourselves together, and that's something this style of research really lets you explore. If you think about the stories you tell about yourself, what parts of your past and your future do you connect with the most?
References
Brook, M. (2020). I feel like and it feels like: Two paths to the emergence of epistemic markers. Linguistic Vanguard, 6(1), Article 20180068. DOI: https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1515/lingvan-2018-0068.
EDEN Gallery. (2021, September 9). Digital art vs traditional art. https://www.eden-gallery.com/news/traditional-art-vs-digital-art.
Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In J. Helm (Ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual arts (pp. 12-44). University of Washington Press.
Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Content. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved March 2, 2025, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/content.
Paredes, A. (2019). Person drawing pineapple [Photograph]. Pexels. https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-drawing-pineapple-2218171/.
Sandino, L. (2010). Artists-in-progress. In M. Hyvärinen, L. Hydén, M. Saarenheimo, & M. Tamboukou (Eds.), Beyond narrative coherence (pp. 87-102). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Shaffi, S. (2023, January 23). ‘It’s the opposite of art’: Why illustrators are furious about AI. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jan/23/its-the-opposite-of-art-why-illustrators-are-furious-about-ai.
Van Goph, V. (1889). The starry night [Painting]. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, United States. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79802.