Narrative Identity and Artistic Narration

Abstract

By organizing and concretizing experiences, art is an effective means to con struct identity. As a promoter of the reflexive project of the self, art is especi ally 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 compassion ate 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.