Donna Wright, lecturer at CQU Brisbane International Campus, is taking her PhD research outcomes on contemporary intercultural communication to the world this year.

Ms Wright specializes in intercultural communication, visual culture and visual arts practice.

Through the use of the creative and visual arts, she explores how meaning can be reconstructed through cross-cultural exposure and intercultural exchange.

Her ongoing research investigates the nature of meaning making and the significance of creativity and creative practice in setting up sites for shared understanding in a contemporary and globally interactive world.

The project, titled 'Big Blue Ball: Pictures, people, place' has been carried out under the direction of Southern Cross University, Australia.

Through a process of open engagement with cultural diversity and assisted by the communication tools of the visual and creative arts, Ms Wright’s project allows for the emergence of hybridised interpretations brought about by the collision and/or interaction of different meaning spaces already formed in project participants by embedded cultural memory codes.

Eight pictures, ‘primary cultural texts’, were specifically developed for the project and provided to participants for interpretation.

A total of 150 young adults from 90 nationalities have taken part in the research to date and it continues to regularly engage new members from around the world.

Encouraging the use of the communication technologies developed within the creative and visual arts has given participants the opportunity to expand creative possibilities, dynamically activating creative processes and allowing for a wider range of representation that can more adequately illustrate their ideas.

Project members have responded by writing descriptives, poetry, narratives and free word associations in English and in their first language. Paintings have been produced, digitised images have been created, images have been hybridised, and other pictures and photos have replaced them.

The project is extended through a continuing interchange of ideas between Ms Wright and project members.

Creative reflections of participants’ interpretations have been recorded on miniatures; small, magnetic-backed, wooden blocks, 100x100mm in size.

The blocks are protected by a hard, clear lacquer. They fit neatly in the palm of a person’s hand, are accessible and easy to handle.

These hand-painted pictures act as memory units providing a collection of semiotic building blocks that can be renegotiated by the viewer.

Over 200 of these miniature ‘imagetexts’ have been produced and are made publicly available at various exhibiting sites; spectators can continue the communication process by moving the blocks around on the table and up the wall, reflexively constructing new ideas and new meanings.

In July 2006, Ms Wright presented a paper on the research at the 4th International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities in Tunisia and an article was subsequently published in the International Humanities Journal, Vol 4, in November.

The project’s dedicated website www.blueballproject.net went online in January, linking participants to each other and sharing their ideas and creative expressions with the world.

Stage 2 of the website will see the collection of painted miniatures become an interactive playground where viewers can move the ‘imagetexts’ into a canvas, designing their own mosaics of ideas, forming and reforming new meanings, and creating a communication chain around the world.

Also this year, the completed project will be exhibited publicly for the first time in its entirety at NEXT Gallery at Southern Cross University in Lismore.

It will then travel to Paris to be exhibited at the American University in Paris (AUP) during the 5th International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities which will be held there in July.

Ms Wright will be presenting a workshop-style presentation at the conference where delegates can physically engage and interact with the visual components of the research.

She will also be travelling to Amsterdam while she is in Europe to present a paper on the project at the 7th International Conference on Diversity in Communities, Organisations and Nations.

In addition, Ms Wright has secured a 6-week studio residency at Centre International d’Accueil et d'Echanges des Recollets in Paris where she will be executing a series of 8 paintings that are intended to synthesise the project outcomes by merging the intercultural creative exchanges to date.

This extension will show how the communication practice of making art can broaden understandings of ourselves and the world, and encourage diversity awareness and tolerance.

It will also provide an opportunity for cultural exchange on a local level.

The 8 paintings produced in Paris will accompany the exhibition and interactive workshop at the 5th International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities at AUP in July 2007.

Ms Wright’s project supports the ideal of visual and creative arts practice based research as a valid approach to new meaning creation and its valuable contribution to the knowledge economy.

Photos: Donna Wright ... her hand-painted wooden blocks form a continuing dialogic interchange between researcher, participants and the public.