Spiral Beginnings

This visual rendering was developed through my PhD research into intercultural understanding in visual arts education. Positioned within arts-based educational research and a/r/tography, it traces an early moment of living inquiry, when my ideas across art, education, and research were still emerging, scattered, and unfinished. A/r/tography understands inquiry as lived, relational, embodied, and continually unfolding, rather than as a fixed method or linear procedure (Irwin & de Cosson, 2004; Springgay et al., 2005). This understanding became visible to me through an ordinary moment of watching my son draw spiral lines with colourful pencils. As the lines moved, curved, returned, and expanded across the paper, I began to recognise the spiral as a methodological metaphor for my own thinking. It offered a way to understand inquiry not as a straight line, but as a process of circling, returning, gathering, and transforming meaning over time. Through digital drawing and visual composition, this work renders the abstract and rhizomatic qualities of a/r/tography into a spiral form, where scattered sparks of thought slowly gather and become a methodological movement within my yinyang-informed a/r/tographic study (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Irwin & de Cosson, 2004; Springgay et al., 2005; Wang, 2012). References Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Irwin, R. L., & de Cosson, A. (Eds.). (2004). A/r/tography: Rendering self through arts-based living inquiry. Pacific Educational Press. Springgay, S., Irwin, R. L., & Kind, S. W. (2005). A/r/tography as living inquiry through art and text. Qualitative Inquiry, 11(6), 897–912. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800405280696 Wang, R. R. (2012). Yinyang: The way of heaven and earth in Chinese thought and culture. Cambridge University Press.