Donna Wright (Australia)
PhD-Arts & Social Sciences; MA-Visual Art; Grad.Dip Education & Training; BA-Fine Art; Dip.Design; Cert.TESOL

I have been a visual artist and educator for over thirty years. I was born in Australia but the bones of my ancestors are buried in Ireland. As part of Australia's Celtic diaspora, I inhabit the unwelcome space of the trespasser on traditional lands that were never ceded, and so I find myself caught in the Settler's dilemma. My flesh and bone hold ancient stories of distant ancestors, their lands and languages long forgotten. Yet here I am, born on land I don't belong to, whose own stories are shaped by different tongue and different ways. 

My art practice involves drawing out cultural memory, its residues and movements across generations, and its aesthetic influences on the ways we perceive, shape and engage in the world around us. This engagement extends, no, is intrinsically rooted, in the deep and ancient relationships we form with the natural world, for I believe that it is in the deep layers of the land, sea, water and sky that memories are saved, and stories passed on

My creative, and ethical enquiries always find me drawn to the edges of this land, that isn’t home, where foreign stories wash up on shorelines, take root or drift back into ocean currents. It is in this place of no-belonging that I find myself capturing momentary aesthetic impressions of distant cultural memories that form and reform in a continual state of disremembering. My art practice continues to ask the same question: What does home feel like?