Looking inwards with Dr Jane Gooding Brown, Virgin Walls, Blackheath NSW, 2016 

Excess

“A rhizome is an assemblage that moves and flows in dynamic momentum. The rhizome operates by variation, perverse mutation, and flows of intensities that penetrate meaning, opening to what Jacques Derrida (1978) calls the “as yet unnamable which begins to proclaim itself” (p.293).  It is an interstitial space, open and vulnerable where meanings and understandings are interrogated and ruptured” (Springgay, 2008, p.158).

Designed, curated and told in the excess, this portfolio as pedagogy creates the opening for a becoming event - framed by the a/r/tographical and found in the gaps for creativity through person, process, practice, product and place ‘making’. “Excess is that which is created when control and regulation disappear and we grapple with what lies outside the acceptable” (Irwin & Springgay, 2008). In this excess as an artist in wonderland, I have been able to curate this storied pedagogy through person (self and others), process (storying, collection, reflection, pedagogy), practice (cite, sight & site), product (making, knowing, doing) and place ‘making’ (through creativity, composition & curation) and I would like students to be able to develop an understanding of this embodied knowledge for self as artist in the liminal spaces for creativity as a result. In the liminal spaces of creativity, we can embody and perform what ​artist is through the curation of stories about learning as an artist in wonderland. As artist-teachers we have an opening and opportunity to:

1. Develop ideas for mapping creative practice through the design, composition, reflection and curation of a digital site of choice that uses themes generated in-site found in relational learning spaces. 
2. Develop a digital installation as a portfolio that traces and maps creative art practice over time through the collection of multi-modal artefacts such as text, images, objects, sound bytes and video that demonstrates reflection on process and product in the form of an evidence-based personalised portfolio. 
3. Develop and publish a curated exhibition space for an audience as a graduate that demonstrates sustained practice, a creative becoming, and highlights the artist’s common threads developed over time as auto-ethnographer. 

The potential of digital portfolios in art education lies in the opening of digital portfolio pedagogy to shift and reflect our practical and theoretical art worlds. Developing a practice of portfolios as relational objects that invite discourse through materiality and curation by the artist while creating a place that acts as a second site for the artist collection, in the rhizome of the digital. I am dedicated to inviting the digital into art education as both a pedagogy that supports our discipline as a relational site of creativity, as well an invisible space that artists can harness through curatorial devices.

In the excess of this a/r/tographic exploration, I have rendered and assembled a collaged and storied curriculum, rather, curated a storied pedagogy. “A/r/tographical works are often rendered through the methodological concepts of contiguity, living inquiry, openings, metaphor/metonymy, reverberations and excess which are enacted and presented/performed when a relational aesthetic inquiry condition is envisioned as embodied understandings and exchanges between art and text, and between and among the broadly conceived identities of artist/researcher/teacher” (Irwin, ND).
 
As a digital living inquiry, a rhizomatic dissertation, rather than collect data or interview artists about their use of the digital, I have practiced between “art and graphy, or image and word” (Springgay, Irwin & Wilson Kind, 2005, p.900), in-between digital sites and physical sights, thus  curating  these spaces and places together.  To curate this intertwined a/r/tographic exploration, I have gazed back and forth through the critical lenses of auto-ethnography, and ethnographic video while practicing between. As an insider I understand how meaningful the digital, and the between of the digital and physical is to the contemporary artist, researcher and teacher. Here the between of the digital and physical is woven in my storytelling. Opening the digital in this relational site, as a visible learning space, hidden in the invisible digital world I have opened the living inquiry, created within a Portfolio here in the excess.

Pamela Griffith

​I don’t see the digital as a force to be ignored or grappled with, rather harnessed and rendered as another space of social, political and cultural significance for artists to be explored. It is not the digital but the affordance of the portfolio in the digital that interests me in this inquiry. An a/r/tographic approach through auto-ethnography and ethnographic understanding has offered new insights into the artist portfolio as an art object, an archival and curated relational aesthetic. This opening has led to a greater and deeper understanding of the portfolio as a valued cultural artefact of creativity, an art encounter.
 

I suggest; A digital portfolio pedagogy for art education creates possibilities for creativity, self discovery and developing digital fluency. The digital portfolio is a site of new media, where the common threads of practice, memory, storytelling and embodied understanding are found in the liminal spaces through sustained creative practice. ​

Samuel Massey

Pamela Frandina is an American artist from New York State. Her portfolio is housed in a web space and private domain at http://pamelafrandina.com/ Pam’s portfolio is an online exhibition site that explores her photomedia and socio-cultural photographic commentary. Her images are located on pages that lead inwards from her home page, about me page, curriculum vita, work and contact details. Pam’s practice is categorized by pages as galleries that extend into creative work, freelance, snapshots and pedagogical significance where her teaching influences are presented. Pam’s art works are dialogic, some confronting political montages, others constructed collage narratives that invite the participant to question reality and hyperreality. Her images reverberate in their meaning and ask her audience to consider the factual, real and surreal in a media that we often take ‘reality’ for granted in. She cites in her portfolio “I foresee visual communication becoming a mandated core class. Courses could introduce interpretative techniques applied to signs, symbols, ciphers, metaphors, convergence, materials, process, and presentation. Repeat practice with visual analyzation would prepare students with interpretative skills necessary for continued decipherment of our evolving visual language” (Frandina, 2016, para. 6).

Pamela Frandina

As an a/r/tographic explorer, an important aspect of this inquiry is the mapping of the cartographic journey as an artist in wonderland. This A/R/T Portfolio is both a product of this mapping of a/r/tography and a cartographic journey as a digital pedagogical artefact for art education (Irwin, Bickel, Triggs, Springgay, Beer, Grauer, Xiong & Sameshima, 2009). I have created and curated this Portfolio as a both an object of a/r/tography and as a site to be utilised by art education to build bridges between learning sites and sights. This conceptual site is a pedagogical site, artist site and site of research, designed as a space for creative learning in our classrooms, studios and portfolios to create openings and opportunities to render creativity in site/sight; for my students, colleagues and participants for creativity. Through the design of this a/r/tographic pedagogy my own experience of the digital portfolio as a space for individual reflection, self-discovery and site of sustained creative practice has deepened and shifted. These shifts and turns to creativity and reflection through praxis include how important portfolios are for the new world of the digital in visual arts, as a new media site, we engage in keeping our discipline relevant in schools, necessary in education and imperative for developing new skills needed for the future as thinkers, makers and relators.
​
Indeed, as Emery and Flood (1998) suggested almost twenty years ago, “visual artists have always pushed the limits of the available technology” (p.9). 

Screenshot of Belinda Allen's Portfolio, 2015

Screenshot of Belinda Allen's Portfolio, 2016

Belinda Allen’s portfolio is an opening into a world that highlights the artist journey in a political, social, cultural and environmental world, living in the digital. Belinda is an Australian artist who lives with a National Park, her practice is between worlds and sites as is her creative life. Her portfolio is an ever changing and growing digital site that she routinely archives and re-curates. Belinda's art works are chronologically curated and have been published in the portfolio site on the since 2002. Belinda’s portfolio begins with “Welcome to my online visual art folio, representing work I have done in photomedia and photography, assemblage and installation over the last several years.The homepage of the blog shows posts as work is completed, or you can find portfolio categories in the drop down list.” Belinda's practice is curated here to exhibit together her bodies of work that are multi-faceted and reflective of an artist interested in socio-political commentary and environmental activism. Belinda’s portfolio is curated in a public WordPress site and has both a top bar and left hand page navigation that leads her audience from her home page, to recent work, exhibitions, about the portfolio, archive, about the artist and contact information. As a photographer, the inherent understanding of resolution is present in this digital exhibition, her images are presented for exhibition here in high resolution and open in new pages when you click them. Belinda’s earlier portfolio can be found in an archived link that directs you to a site that has works dated back to 1991. 

A digital portfolio pedagogy is an opening in secondary visual arts for the presentation of both creative process and practice interwoven, archived and curated through habit of mind in a place to explore oneself as a creative while developing self efficacy through self discovery. “Sociocultural approaches to learning have recognized that kids gain most of their knowledge and competencies in contexts that do not involve formal instruction” (Ito, 2013, p.21). This storied pedagogy is designed in this serendipitous, rhizomatic exploration space, that weaves formal and informal learning together through praxis. Not all of our artist-students want or need to be artists, however, we have the tools to support their development of new media and digital literacies through visuacy and creativity in art education through the lens of the artist. Secondary art education is not about creating employable learners, it is however, a multi-disciplinary space to create openings and reverberations from the world’s knowledge and skills, while developing dispositions and capabilities needed for life long learning as active, empathetic and moral digital global citizens. I want our future generations to have the visuacy skills and inclusive cultural knowledge to continue to be life wide learners through visible, innovative and creative learning. 

As an art educator, I create opportunities for students to be learners and teachers of themselves, by enabling contiguity to be developed through authentic assessment as learning in art, about art and for art. To develop and create openings in artistry for digital, numeracy and multliteracies (1996) as the New London Group suggest. “The logic of ‘Multiliteracies’ is one which recognises that meaning making is an active, transformative process, and a pedagogy based on that recognition is more likely to open up viable lifecourses for a world of change and diversity” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2008, p.10). I create opportunities to build and develop these skills, experiences and knowledge in reflection of art histories, art theories and creative practice as art makers, art audiences and art writers is an important cultural competency. As a/r/tographer, I now want to create openings to the possibilities of artful and design thinking, and problem solving through creativity in-between the digital and physical space as a living inquiry. To create opportunities to understand making, doing and relating as an ideological process for artists, and for unintended, intuitive and serendipitous moments of success to be captured and curated. This transformative yet bound threshold learning is key to my desire for a contemporary art education and a/r/tographic pedagogy that claims creativity while creating opportunities for self doscovery. Here in the excess, I have curated my threshold learning within digital portfolios, while creating openings for creativity, identity and self efficacy. 

Ahmad Sabra

The audience is an active participant in this digital gallery, as the slideshow scrolls through a range of Ahmad’s artworks, untitled and exhibited in a formal style where the audience also has control of the view finder, shifting images left to right. Ahmad Sabra is a Melbourne based Australian artist. His portfolio is a digital gallery and live exhibition found at his site profile http://sabra-imagery.com.au/ Ahmad’s portfolio is thematic, and participation is directed from his About me page toward his Portraits, Journalistic images, Landscapes, and contact information that lead toward his final page – a business that provides the openings for his artistic career to weave its way into artful photography, and where he has found many awards, in Wedding Photography. Ahmad’s About me text includes his artist philosophy: “My photography work is predominantly focused on documenting the Muslim community in Australia. In my photographs I try to explore the lives of individuals in the Muslim community who identify themselves as Muslims. The Muslim community are often portrayed negatively; I seek to demystify these negative opinions from an internal perspective, while maintaining objectivity”. Ahmad has an active Instagram account: lebotographer where he describes himself as Ahmad Sabra Camera hoarder, photographer and hummus lover. The images across both spaces are similar, but the style of exhibition is characterised by the design of the pages, size of the images and limiting active participation. Ahmad’s Instagram is less exhibition space, and more visual diary. 

In my state of Victoria, Australia Visual Arts aims to develop students’:

• “conceptual and perceptual ideas and expressions through design and inquiry processes,
• visual arts techniques, materials, processes and technologies,
• critical and creative thinking, using visual arts languages, theories and practices to apply aesthetic judgment,
• respect for and acknowledgement of the diverse roles, innovations, traditions, histories and cultures of artists, craftspeople, designers, curators, critics and commentators,
• respect for visual arts as social and cultural practices, including industry practices, and
• confidence, curiosity, imagination and enjoyment and a personal aesthetic through engagement with visual arts making, viewing, discussing, analysing, interpreting and evaluating” (VCAA, ND).

To create the opportunities to evidence these outcomes through sustained and deep learning, ongoing reflection and curation of these skills, experiences and knowledge this Portfolio is designed as a living inquiry between sites. It is a participatory learning ecology to support students to be aesthetically and conceptually affected by art and creativity to develop students through art, and for art. 

Samuel Massey 

Samuel Massey’s portfolio is developed as a survey show, a digital exhibition in a Wix portfolio site. Samuel is an Australian painter, based in Sydney. His figurative, emotional landscapes are glimpses into visual narratives of relationships with paint, light and humanity. Sam’s portfolio is designed and curated in formal spaces that lead from an opening image with limited text, navigated by the text bar at the top of the page. Each digital gallery room is directed from a white heading beginning About and Paintings. About opens with an Artist photograph and About Me statement that includes this text: “His ambiguous narratives lead to open ended paintings that seem to seek purpose through absurd action. His works have been included in group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Massey currently works from his home studio in the Hawkesbury.” The About section includes his artist statement, CV and contact details. From Paintings there are eight rooms that are chronological from Samuel’s latest work back through his selected catalogue curated here in collections to 2013. Looking through Sam’s portfolio the common threads woven though his symbolism and metaphors of the narrative are evident. 

Portfolios and artist diaries are spaces of exploration, reflection and ideation for many art-makers. They have taken different forms and purposes as new technologies have been designed. This inquiry framework and currere seeks to re-present how the design of a storied visual art pedagogy can support learners to design and develop digital spaces like Andy Warhol time capsules, and curate places that present their creative practice and artist self throughout many learning journeys as exhibitions. Wonderland is the recurring metaphor (of my experience in the portfolio community.) that has permeated my professional life. It was first used as a metaphor in my initial ePortfolio conference presentation  in 2012, and was titled ‘Celebrating the Curious, Curiouser and Curiouser: The Creative and Capable Learner at AAEEBL 2012. It has been my metaphor for learning, teaching and digital research that shifts and turns, providing new openings over many years of practice.

It is a guiding metaphor for this contiguous inquiry and for this A/R/T Portfolio and digital learning design. Through the metaphor of Wonderland, where Alice meets wondrous characters, she questions herself, discovers how brave she is and transforms her identity; this inquiry and pedagogy has introduced relational aesthetics, visuacy, curation and identity through the work and stories of contemporary international artists who have digital profiles and portfolios. Portfolios as archival places that open the opportunity to explore, design, and curate practice and creativity through the presentation of bodies of work in galleries, as a digital survey show, a monograph. 

Laurie Gatlin

Laurie Gatlin is California based artist, living and working in the United States of America. Her practice is generated by her artist, researcher and teacher selves and these identities are presented and curated in her living digital portfolio. Laurie’s portfolio is presented in the National Art Education Association (NAEA) ePortfolio platform Digication. Digication provides all NAEA members with access to their ePortfolio platform to curate their praxis. Laurie’s portfolio is colourful, clear and easy to navigate. Her portfolio opens with the artist’s artworks along the banner heading, below, her room navigation that lead the viewer from her ‘This is me page’ through to her a/r/t philosophy. All of the pages begin with ‘This is’. She is opening her personal library and didactic site to her participants through a conversational approach and dialogic digital pedagogy. From This is me, we are greeted by This is some student work, This is conference work, This is my philosophy of education, This is my artwork, These are my sketchbook pages, This is my vitae, ending with This is my contact info. From this navigation bar we head from room to room, being led through carefully curated spaces to invite discourse with Laurie’s praxis. Inside These are my sketchbook pages you find Laurie’s sustained and living practice. These reflective practice images and colleagues, show her identity and interwoven selves. 

“A/r/t/ographic teaching begins with a teacher who is an a/r/tographer, a reflexive practitioner” who uses their intertwined and braided identities. While “living as an artist, researcher, and teacher, an a/r/tographer reconceptualises curriculum so that activities issue from the processes lived in the dynamic, changing context of the classroom” (Wiebe, Sameshima, Irwin, Leggo, Gouzouasis & Grauer, 2007, p.259). As with many a/r/tographic studies, this inquiry is centred upon the the researcher as participant. In this instance, I am performing the research and designing learning through a personalised currere of my embodied praxis and living inquiry as a/r/tist. However, what I have learned as an artist-researcher from these co-participants about portfolios in action is an important aspect of this shared journey and storied pedagogy. 

Glenn Smith

Glenn Smith is an Australian artist, living, working and exhibiting in Sydney. As a contemporary artist using a range of digital sites and spaces, Glenn has a vast amount of work online, he is a prolific artist  He has two artist portfolios that house curated works, philosophies and archived sites that remain open and link via threads to his more active Instagram space. His portfolio notice posted in 2014 reads: “You would have noticed that there is close to three years’ worth of art and updates that are missing from the site. The main reason is that I have had no time. I’ve spent it all on making art. Until it got too overwhelming to choose what to update. So I have changed it to the more immediate and less time consuming Instagram format.” This inactive but live gallery portfolio houses a lot of Glenn’s art. Art that spans a number of years of practice, identities and communities that he works in. The site is curated in a blog at http://www.glennoart.com/. The blog style presents an artist persona that is open and comfortable, displaying images wrapped in text and narrative in conversation with his audiences. The page navigation of the blog folio leads from the Blog to themed headers: Rockin Art, Colour Art, Black & White Art, Comic Art, Chinese Burns Unit, Store, Links and then a redirection to his Old Site - Weird Galaxy. 

Belinda Allen

Samuel Massey

Awakening an artist in wonderland

Weaving with paper is a slow process. The cutting, gluing and making of new sentences in the cut-up process provides time for reflection and reflexive thinking. Folding, cutting, gluing, weaving is thoughtful work, the spaces and gaps left between the warp and weft are purposeful yet serendipitous. Working in cut up academic papers and forming new sentences as I worked along the length of the newly formed thread, I created new ideas, new theories and methods for learning, teaching and research. Weaving new concepts as I tied my fields of art, education and digital pedagogies with a/r/tographic explorations investigated by colleagues who paved the way before me. I was generating a new pedagogy, driven by dialogue and discourse that united disparate or siloed ways of thinking as one. Weaving this storied curriculum as pedagogy to emphasise a personalized and learning centred framework with creativity at the centre of the inquiry is important. As a living inquiry, the central theme continues to emerge as the a/r/tographer embodies and cites new ideas, opening new questions, reverberations and excesses that need to be explored. Mapping wonderland through the exploration of cutting, gluing weaving and folding has been a profound aesthetic affect. 

In this storied art pedagogy, the ideation for making, responding and learning design is an inquiry framework, reflected on in the openings, to reverberate and resonate as a digital provocation. A provocation to art education to bring the digital into our studios to support our learners to develop a sense of self as artist through making art for portfolios, responding to art and artistry in portfolios and developing a portfolio pedagogy that invites artist-students to look, see and notice the world around them through the lens of the artist. 

My a/r/tographic methodology allows me to gather and collect “narratives, written, oral, visual, focusing on the meanings that people ascribe to their experiences” (Trahar, 2009, p.1) and to curate them here, woven and intertwined amongst my own narratives and experiences in the digital. A digital portfolio is more than mere collection, for as analyst, storyteller and curator, I am also a privileged spectator and biographer, ethnographer and relational artist. 

Each of the co-participants have shared their stories. I have listened, edited, and learned from these journeys through the collection, reflection, editing, weaving and curation of these artist’s lives and journeys with my own in a format that opened sights and sites for learning.  Here, in the digital I have found new notions of artist portfolio development, new ideas of artist identity, creativity and new ways of thinking about artist and aesthetic. 

​“When curriculum is understood as narratively constructed and reconstructed through experience, the stories lived and told by students and teachers of what is important, relevant, meaningful, or problematic for them are valued” (Olson, 2000, p.170). An A/r/tist in Wonderland is told through this auto-ethnographic lens that has been held critically to imagine and performs the renderings of a/r/tography. Here in wonderland through an investigation of personal visual metaphors of creative practice, students can render their own metaphor for I AM Artist while exploring identity through a learner cartography, an identity mapping of practice, beginning with their earliest memories of making art.

Driving along one of the bumpiest of dirt roads in Salt Lake City is the first vivid, visual memory I have of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. This was a pilgrimage for an art encounter. I had driven many miles to see as many art installations, galleries and museums as I could in America. I learned about Spiral Jetty in high school when we studied land art. At art school, the jetty became an important revisit with new theoretical understanding of post modernism and the language of site specific art. As an art teacher, I taught the spiral jetty to develop an insight into site and sight, that has changed, altered and been reimagined by the earth that it was placed on. Using the word road, is actually incorrect.
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​It was a path that we drove our Dodge campervan along, a path for trekkers or hikers really, a dirt path scattered with boulders and rocks in a landscape that could pass for another planet other than Earth. The kind of road where the bottom of the car feels like it drops out on each fall as the wheels’ bounce, past beautiful old rusty cars that seemed to have been installed on site. These cars and others found in Utah formed a body of work called Forlorn that was an important shift in my art practice, a turn to photography in 2006. When you get to the bend before the jetty sits out in front of you in the pinkest of water, there is a small parking area. Walking down to the jetty the size of this artwork is overwhelming. The colours and reclaiming of the lake are evident, as is the remoteness of a work that was never meant to be accessed by road. The large basalt stones that were so carefully layered and constructed in the spiral have begun to be taken back by the silt and salt crystals. 

Critically reflecting on art experiences, stories and memories as a/r/t-auto-ethnographer is an important step in rendering a portfolio as a self portrait. Recalling and inviting memories of drawing, colouring, making and sculpting are provocations that we often neglect to invite into our classrooms. In this opening, artist students should be invited to create an ‘I Am’ listicle. Sharing ten things about the self as artist and maker from memories as an opening. This list opens ideas to form the basis of creating an artist statement that will invite critical reflection on skill, experience and knowledge. From the statement, artist-students can explore sites and spaces for the design of their auto-ethnographic digital portfolio to reflect the metaphor and developing artist statement. Inherent in this learning, are digital literacies in selecting and creating digital spaces that are safe, ethical and representative of the artist-student self. This may be completed in a portfolio platform that the student has access to in the school or can begin with a new portfolio platform such as one provided in Edmodo, Google Sites or a digital open digital space such as WordPress, Blogger, Wix, or Weebly.

Zahrah Habibullah

“A/r/tography is a mode of thinking about or theorizing multiplicities. It is not about framing rules or understanding principles, but about the possibilities of intertextual relations” (Springgay, 2008, p. 161). Exploring these relations as an arts based educational researcher, many questions lead from the inquiry in the rhizomatic site lines: How can an understanding of self be harnessed by the design of artist metaphors?  How can digital portfolios provide the site for exploration of self and support the development of an artist identity? Does an artist identity support production of work? 

​In a portfolio wonderland, artist-students can develop an understanding of the process of digital portfolio development and publication through:

• Reflection (Collection)
• Self-Assessment (Selection)
• Connection (Curation)
• Relational Aesthetics and Object as Art Encounters (Creative affect)

For a number of Christmases when I was a high school art teacher, we visited the north coast of New South Wales for a restful break. Here on the beaches and sitting at the kitchen table of our rented house, I would write my new art programs for the new teaching year. I loved writing new curriculum, each one a new story for the year and a becoming event for new and returning artist-students as they engaged in the artworld as artist, critic and historian. I still backward design curriculum, from the product as artwork,  gazing back through the processes of doing, reading, writing, making and testing while interweaving the artists’ voices, practices and worlds throughout.  The artists lead the design for me, the practices that I want to teach art through, as lenses for praxis. Their voices are important to hear and learn from. 

​Iben Bentzen (2008) when asked ‘What are the specific topics on curating you would like to see more openly discussed?’ in Issue one, Thirty-one Positions on Curating, replied with four key questions that intervene as provocations in the excess:
1. “Creative curating: what happens when the curator is a collaborative partner in the creative process of creating and defining the works? In which ways can the contemporary curator be viewed as a coach?
2. Creating web exhibitions: if more and more virtual and digital exhibition spaces emerge in the future, what does that demand from the curator? From the artists? From the viewers?
3. The artist is the curator is the artist: many curators today are artists and vice versa. It gives an insight into both roles and this knowledge is important to understanding the different steps of building up an exhibition or creating an art piece. When and how can the myth of these two roles  be separated be killed?
4. Why are there so few educations focusing on curating?” (p.2).

Mapping the rhizomes as questions and actions has allowed me to open the ideas to consider portfolios as sites for Art criticism and Curation as Bentzen provokes.  What would it look like if we took what we know about museums, curation, digital story telling and digital portfolios and asked our students to use the digital content of museums to learn about art history, theory and themselves as artists through the development of a digital portfolio curated from the digital archives of museums and galleries? Through an investigation of practice, artist-students could utilize digital museum sites to collect digital images to develop skills in creative curating of art based on:

• The cabinet of treasures
• Monographic display
• Historical survey
• Juxtaposition of themes or compositions
• Experiential space
• Installation

These curatorial themes are drawn from The Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture (1996) where Nicholas Serrota defines a museum as ‘monument’ and presents how curators work to ‘suggest’ or ‘stage’ the narrative in the selections that they make in the museum to lead the viewer on a journey. Teaching students to collect, select,  reflect  and curate practice digitally supports students as they learn contemporary skills to interpret,  assemble, design,  compose  and tell stories about their process and material practice. To deep on these provocations and I reply with actions that the artist-teacher and artist-students could follow. Action: Students curate a virtual exhibition as a digital Museum Curator rather than the Artist Curator. This lens of learning can further support digital and visuacy as students learn to use composition, design and page layout, semantic and visual cues to lead and guide an audience for a different purpose and context to curate the work of others to build knowledge in action.
 
As an artist, this Portfolio is a visual narrative, a dialogue and story of my a/r/t practice. Each portfolio that an artist presents to an audience has a different story to tell in their selection, collection and curation of artefacts and the narrative that they explore. Digital portfolios as sites for Artist as Cartographer would be an opening to mapping practice by creating a virtual retrospective of the self.  In this pedagogy, students design a visual metaphor that represents what an artist’s portfolio is, does and the purpose it holds in practice.

​This metaphor begins the mapping of the rhizome, and serves as the centre of the portfolio design. “A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to a tracing” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.12) and will provide a site map for the portfolio design. Action: Students begin the collection of their artist practice and evidence of learning in the visual arts (process, product and narrative) by making a series digital folders – a digital repository and collection site to curate from. A virtual storage and archival room to collect and reflect on art practice, art theory and art history while developing the artist-student self.

In this pedagogy, ‘The artist is the curator is the artist’ and the digital portfolio is a Wunderkammer where the students take stock of what have they have got in their digital repository, as a Self Portrait though Reflection. Students can explore the artist portfolios shared in this Portfolio for influence and inspiration while creating their own digital cabinet of curiosity. A digital portfolio is a labyrinth, a rhizomatic space that weaves its way in and around the mapping of practice. Using the metaphor in the ideation phase of portfolio design, initiate creating spaces within the site for categories, themes, media explorations. Action: Students continue to collect artist practice and evidence of learning in the visual arts to gain an understanding of the portfolio as a cyclic and iterative exhibition that continues to grow and change over time.  What will my students know? How to sequence images and text to build a personal digital site that reflects identity as artist-student and developing practice over time. 

Learning in art as artist and as audience involves critical thinking (Eisner, 1965), critical judgment (Ennis, 1985; 1991),  divergent thinking that explore the creative dimensions of learning (Robinson, 2000; 2006) and aesthetic judgment. Teaching this capability, through portfolio development provides a project based learning opportunity for ‘creative becoming’ and self awareness through experience creating web exhibitions.  In this pedagogy, students create a digital artist portfolio in a site using a range of digital curation skills that include composition, creativity, selection of space and placemaking to demonstrate digital literacy as site for Experiential thinking.  What is the purpose of an artist’s portfolio? What is the site for your learning story? “Digital literacy is less about tools and more about thinking, and thus skills and standards based on tools and platforms have proven to be somewhat ephemeral” (Johnson, et al., 2015, p.24). Action: Students refine and select from the collection of their artist practice and evidence of learning to curate an exhibition of practice that reflects both art maker, art researcher and art dialogic to present a site using placemaking to reflect the intent and philosophies of the self as artist. 

In this pedagogy, the digital portfolio is designed to focus on curating as a digital site as site-specific, monographic display as historical survey. Curated a relational space through holding a mirror to the self - a review of practice. How can the investigation of artist monographs, retrospectives and solo exhibitions support the design and development of artist practice in a digital portfolio? Presenting the self in site, through viewpoint and display, temporality, memory, mass mediations, art as a visual event the portfolio shifts as site for installation. Action: Students curate the collection of their artist practice and evidence of learning as a digital installation that leads an audience through a digital story, shared in a site that references relational aesthetics as a relational space.
 
The inquiries and learning opportunities for personalised and creative learning I have opened following Iben Bentzen (2008), follow two practice based research explorations. The first is an exploration of self, and the second through an exploration of self through others. “The goal of personalised learning is to create possibilities for learners to determine the strategy and pace at which they learn” (Johnson, et al., 2015, p.26).  The practice of portfolio thinking and reflection, curation and exhibition are key understanding and knowledge in this a/r/tographic exploration that are often uncomfortable and difficult. Where questions, interventions and provocations direct, lead and shift the things we take for granted in art and in formal learning.  Rhizomatic and relational learning is both informal and formal when we bring digital portfolios into the mix we need are prompted to ask more questions: “So what is an art exhibition? A simple platform of presentation? A space of negotiation for artists, curators and market? A production space? An educational model? A field for direct action? An allegoric space? A discussion space? A didactic play or a conditioned space?” (Scotini, 2008, p.2). 

Working and learning in the liminal spaces of creativity can be complex, there is often no clear path, no easy answers or solutions to problems when learning is serendipitous and “based on the immediate identified needs, rather than a strict pre-planned sequence” (Jeanneret & Wilson, InPress, p.4). Here in the gaps and wilds of wonderland, I believe that students must become passionate constructors of their own knowledge and creators of their own communities, supported by their artist teachers. As Dunleavy & Milton (2009) found when they "asked students what their ideal school would look like and what learning environment increases engagement. Students listed three criteria that correlate to the concept of interaction: (1) Learn from and with each other and people in their community, (2) Connect with experts and expertise, and (3) Have more opportunities for dialogue and conversation (p. 10)" (Taylor & Parson, 2011, pp. 8-9). Portfolios are not a learning space that can be added on at the end of a learning design, they are personalised spaces of discovery, both learner and learning centred, sustained exploration spaces that need to be scaffolded, supported by a community and built iteratively with the pedagogy over time for successful curation. Modelling and scaffolding through building skills in curation, reflection and synthesis for creativity using storytelling as a cyclic activity can lead to new knowledge about the self, about art and about the relationship between art and art education as time, memory, space and narrative are explored.  The curated space of an exhibition requires ongoing maintenance, feedback and re-writing of the digital story or it can be archived and stored as a digital time capsule. 

The metaphor of Alice in wonderland, opens the space to consider how artist identity can be explored through learning to learn about art through relational aesthetics rendered in the digital. In the “in-between of thinking and materiality…the interstitial spaces of art making, researching, and teaching” (Springgay, 2008, p. 160) the overarching theme of wonderland, considers the narrative of wonderland as a metaphoric guide, a map to design and exhibit digital rooms of developing practice. As curator Verena Kuni (2008) suggests, “a good curatorial concept should work on both levels, local and international. And as it is on site, the place where whatever you are curating becomes real, I consider it as most crucial to devote a good portion of attention to the local conditions” (p.8). A curated digital portfolio as an art encounter, a becoming event seeks to support students to develop and build skills in synthesizing knowledge about art theory and art making through transformation of content through analysis, reflection, evaluation and digital responsibility as digital placemakers.

Pamela Griffith

Pamela Griffith lives and works in Sydney’s South. Her digital site has many functions and spaces within the boundaries of her placemaking, including a chronological artist portfolio. Pamela’s site is designed by an artist who is also a researcher and teacher, utilising the site to educate, share and develop discourse in her fields. We are invited into Pamela’s living inquiry through an opening page that updates the audience about her new work. Greeted with ‘Welcome to the web page of Pamela Griffith Artist-Printmaker’. Pamela establishes her identity up front in this auto-biographical collection that takes her participants through her practice via a left hand navigation that leads from News, Whats’ On, links to social sites to follow her work at LinkedIn and Facebook, Archival links to About Pamela Griffith. Pamela is an established and prolific Australian artist, her site includes a Biography, Bibliography, CV, Commissions and Collections. These links direct you to auto-ethnographical narrative, where Pamela shares her Australian art heritage and practice. Pamela’s web space is a rhizomatic and relational art encounter where the audience is granted entry to her bodies of work and narrative. Further into the navigation we are directed to the Griffith Studio, How to Purchase work, Current bodies of work and a link to Pamela’s book, both the Standard Edition and Collector’s set. In the Image Gallery, Pamela has curated her prolific practice chronologically, threaded throughout the years of her artistry are her works on paper and limited edition prints. Pamela’s digital monograph is a personal wunderkammer, a cabinet of wonder that exhibits her work form 1961 to the present. Her site and practice is sponsored by the Australian artist material company, Derivan. ​

In contemporary music education, Lucy Green’s (2001) research in musicianship has continued to reverberate and resonate in my thinking about art curriculum, pedagogical practice and embodied praxis. Green’s How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education was a text found woven and rendered in the excess of a/r/tographic praxis. She asks, ‘What is it to be musically educated?’ My research has been driven by a rhizomatic thread, being led by a serendipitous line of sight and that allow the openings to shift insightfully. Embodied praxis led to others who’s lived inquiries crossed boundaries between sites of learning that seek to intertwine the formal and informal. Australian music educators and researchers, Jeanneret and Wilson (inpress) identify five of Green’s characteristic learning principles found in her study of musicians and learning:

1. “Learners choose the music to play and set the direction of learning,
2. There is an emphasis on popular musicians,
3. There is an emphasis an aural learning,
4. Learning is undertaken in friendship groups, and
5. Learning is often serendipitous, based on the immediate identified needs, rather than a strict pre-planned sequence” (p.4)

Exploring this praxis pedagogy concept through the lens of a/r/tographic inquiry I draw comparisons to Eric Booth’s (2010), six strands of the arts learning ecosystem to ask: What is it to be educated as an artist? What is it to be artistically educated? Is as Booth defined,

1. “Arts appreciation,
2. Skill building within an artform, 
3. Aesthetic development,
4. Arts integration,
5. Community arts, and
6. Extensions” (pp. 11-12) 
   

the common threads of art pedagogy?
​Booth’s strands lie more predominantly in the Artist as educator community in what it is referred to as informal art learning, led by artists practicing as educators. Green’s praxis model seeks to interlace the informal and formal together more closely for school based artist-teachers, suggesting that we bring the ‘field’ of artistry and artful inquiry found in informal sites into formal teaching and learning opportunities.  I would like to interweave the two approaches of Green (2001) and Booth (2010) to design six new principles in wonderland to bring artist knowing into art education while asking – How do we invite art and artistry into our students living inquiry? Through a tightly woven theory and practice model in portfolios for creativity, through sustained and deep practice as artist. 

These six art and artistry principles would see:

1. Learners design and develop a digital portfolio that reflects their artist identity through the curation of work developed over time.
2. An emphasis on creating a relational and digital site that renders possibilities for creative practice.
3. Learners develop an understanding of the shift from aesthetic to conceptual awareness in art through a professional context in which artists work and practice.
4. An emphasis on creativity, personalised and authentic learning as artist practitioner and artist theorist to see where research informs and influences practice.
5. Space for rhizomatic learning that is iterative and reflective of the serendipitous line that learning leads through through person, process, practice, product and place ‘making’ as creative practitioners.
6. An emphasis on art encounters as becoming events, captured and curated in the portfolio. 

Zahrah Habibullah

Zahrah Habibullah is an Australian Designer Maker, she lives and works in Melbourne. Her portfolio found under her name at http://www.zahrahhabibullah.com/  indicates that her “work embodies a sense of celebration of this world. I love beauty and craftsmanship. I love to question and explore different nuances in the physical realm of visual arts and object design. I aim to create objects and images that make people reflect as well as enjoying the worldly beauty of an object or photograph. Currently I practice a number of disciplines; Jewellery, Photography and Design.” Zahrah’s portfolio site is open, clean and curated to represent her design background. Her work is displayed, arranged and exhibited in this space.’ Zahrah established her portfolio site in 2013, it is a fresh, open and clean white digital gallery, that invites her audience to play a role in her maker self. The top navigation opens with Hello, we are greeted by a portrait of Zahrah and an About Me statement:” My name is Zahrah, I am a Designer/Maker. I like to put something a little extra in the ordinary. I LOVE to craft beautiful things with my hands and tell a story through my lens.” From the welcoming Hello, we are lead to a visual journal of her practice in a blog format. The next tab is Jewellery, where her work is displayed and arranged. We end the visit to her gallery rooms with a contact page.  Zahrah also maintains and curates in a range of sites as an active digital artist in Facebook, Instagram and a professional photographic portfolio for her business. The spaces do not serve to connect rhizomatically, rather, they are exhibited as singular identities that Zahrah weaves her connections as curator in. Zahrah’s Instagram represents her artist, designer-maker, parent, partner self. She invites her audiences to see through her lens as Designer | Maker | Jeweller. It is a personal account of her ‘making and everyday happenings. 

Belinda Allen

Samuel Massey 

How can we make a difference in the lives of our art students? One of my artist-teacher candidates asked me after returning from placement. Feeling disheartened by a standardised learning environment that she felt had effected her learners' abilities to gain an understanding of art and artistry through art making and art theory. She had seen the recent turn of art education toward an activity based, skill and technical box ticking process. Where learning about art is achieved through worksheets and short art experiences rather than through the lens of art maker, art theorist or art researcher. My answer, we are at a time in the world that requires us to look to creativity and art more widely, to learn about ourselves, our histories and the world through the eyes of the artist, art critic, historian, theorist, curator and art educator. The digital advantage we have today, is that we can reconceive a new way to teach and design art through an embodied praxis and understanding of sustained creative practice while learning globally as digital art citizens. We are in a position to create learning spaces that reflect studios physically and digitally, to create the gaps as Flood suggests for our students to make and respond in the liminal spaces that are only found in deep sustained learning. Upon reflection, I would now include that there is an opening here in Victoria where we have a national and state curriculum that has creativity at the centre of its design. In the gaps and spaces we make for creativity, we have the ability to teach seeing, noticing and relating as artists. We are able to support our learners to ‘learn to learn’ through art about artists, in collaboration with artists in digital spaces.

I have pondered this encounter many times throughout the writing of this story of excess. It became a provocation, a trigger for my own a/r/tographic explorations and a prompt to return to the question of What can we learn from artist portfolios to inform art education? Found in the renderings of art education history is an important reply: “the fundamental importance of art is that it echoes or reflects the natural world of which we are a part” (Emery & Flood, 1998, p.8). The digital is an inherent aspect of my pedagogical practice, researcher persona, art maker self, art education and personal life. In our current learning spaces many of us have neglected the digital turn in shaping our learners thinking and understanding of learning in art. The digital portfolio is an opportunity to bring the invisible learning of the digital and curatorial, into the studio, to build visible learning bridges between sights and sites through the artist as the curator as the artist. Hattie’s meta-research suggests that the “biggest effects on student learning occur when teachers become learners of their own teaching, and when students become their own teachers” (2009, p.22). 

Opening this in the excess of the digital, to build metaphorical bridges between the physical site of studio art and into the invisible digital world of art through portfolios, offers new ways to consider how portfolios play a role in making reflection and reflexive thinking on creative process a visible rendering in art education. “Hattie argues that successful classrooms have visible teaching and learning, where there is great passion displayed by the teacher and learner, and where there is a variety and depth of skill and knowledge by both teacher and student” (Research Branch, DEECD, 2010). A digital portfolio in art education has the potential to provide the sight-site-cite for a personal inquiry through curation of the learning journey as artist, utilising the invisible rhizomatic digital tools and applications visibly. A digital portfolio in art has the capacity to shift our thinking about the role that art education plays in our schools, in the lives of our young people and the role of art in our world. As Lange and Ito (2013) agree, the invisible learning spaces of the internet like “sites such as YouTube, Photobucket, and Flickr [have] become established as fixtures of our media-viewing landscape, it is becoming commonplace for people to both post and view personal and amateur videos and photos online as part of their everyday media practice…reshaping our processes for self-expression, learning, and sociability” (p. 246).

Flávia Pedrosa Vasconcelos

Flávia Pedrosa Vasconcelos is a Brazilian a/r/tographer who practices in two-dimensional drawing. Her portfolio is a window to her practice as research, and practice as pedagogy. As a portfolio, her site is in Google’s Blogger, housed in an open site for easy updating and sharing of ideas. The front page of her Artist Images Portfolio is filled with her drawings, like a digital stained glass window. Each drawing opens to a higher resolution version when clicked open. This portfolio is a visual gallery site, there is no narrative or story in text. In this gallery, Flavia hangs her images that are untitled and dated. Opening this portfolio as image gallery I am reminded of the hangings that used to weave their way across my art room, when works were pegged to the string line. This style of gallery portfolio is an entry point for visual storytelling.  Images have been uploaded over a number of years, with at least five drawings per date uploaded. Google Blogger portfolios are all housed under the name of the artist, this rhizomatic experience allows you to connect across sites through the author’s name via hyperlinks. Flávia has five other portfolio sites that can be accessed through the rhizomatic line that bring her other digital identities into focus. These sites include her early artist self, researcher spaces and artist-teacher curriculum sites. 

As Kuni (2008) suggested, “a good curatorial concept should work on both levels, local and international” (p.9). The digital turn to artistry and praxis pedagogy as a visible learning strategy here in the digital portfolio requires the concept to work in the digital. Digital curation is a competency and skill that needs to be explored as a digital literacy. Here, we can extend Belshaw’s (2011) The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies into powerful portfolio pedagogy in our art classrooms that extend and support the six art and artistry portfolio pedagogy principles. Belshaw’s eight digital strategies have played a role in my teaching and learning since Doug’s early research was published online. His was one of the first digital dissertations that I watched develop as a fellow digital educationalist. I have followed his research and shared his digital scholarship and insights in twitter for many years, having digital and virtually talked about digital badges - a digital community that we both work hard to support.  His digital literacies practice and research has continued to sit neatly with me as an artist-researcher working in inter-disciplinary digital learning design. There is not one digital literacy as Belshaw indicates, nor is there one information literacy to gain skill and competency in, there are a number of literacy skills and competencies within the digital and each has its own understanding, knowledge and experience. Since the publication of Doug’s doctorate, these literacies have become part of my language, having been woven into my praxis.
 
To open them in the excess of this inquiry. I have re-defined Belshaw’s literacies here in context to the proposed art and artistry portfolio pedagogy principles:

• Cultural: Developing an awareness of the socio-cultural knowledge of the internet and the digital world is an important characteristic of digital literacy. Understanding site, space and place in the invisible rhizomes are an important literacy for identity, particularly how culturally the digital portfolio represents the self as artist, differently than how Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat sites represent the learner as peer or friend is a contemporary digital skill in representation.
• Cognitive: Developing the working knowledge of digital spaces through reflexive, reflection and placemaking through digital curation, builds metacognitive skills, information literacy (identify, locate, organize) and digital know-how through the use of curatorial devices to display and exhibit process and product in the portfolio. Critical thinking is witnessed in the selection and curation of multi-modal artefacts and the common threads of thinking and making are made aware through digital compositional devices that lead the narrative and auto-ethnographic display.
• Constructive: Creating and composing a personal site that develops meaning through the publication of work by the artist and respectfully displays the work created in a range of digital spaces, as well as the work of others, builds this digital literacy through digital curation. This reuse and remix of digital artefacts is a contemporary artist skill in digital authorship, digital appropriation and digital curation.
• Communicative: Understanding the different digital sites and contexts in which artists work and practice is a contemporary artist literacy in visuacy, identity, creativity and digital language. Presenting the self online in the digital space has inherent risk, developing knowledge of how to communicate ethically and responsibly as artist is an important role for the portfolio.
• Confident: Working across situated and digital spaces and sites in the studio, artist diary and digital portfolio can develop a working understanding of the difference between private, personal and public presentation.
• Creative: Working in the liminal spaces of the digital over time, through sustained and deep learning, reflection and iterative curation provides opportunities to practice in the gaps of creativity. Designing portfolios through curating a digital narrative as auto-ethnographer and through ethnographic understanding can provide the space to create a new genre.
• Critical: Critical thinking and creative problem solving in digital spaces provides the opportunity to develop understanding of creating and making as an ideological process. Making curatorial decisions about publication and presentation requires critical reflective practice, curatorial skills in selection and publication, and the ability to differentiate between metaphor and symbolism, while creating new forms of digital identity.
• Civic: Responsibility, ethical use and design of digital artist space, builds an understanding of the digital as a rhizomatic global site. Developing knowledge of how the invisible learning spaces of the internet function, thrive and work as relational spaces is an opening to audiences and communities, sites and sights not accessed before as art audience. Civic literacy includes developing an understanding of contemporary artist practice in relational spaces, a necessary contemporary artist and digital citizenship attribute. 

When I met with each artist co-participant and discussed their art, artistry and portfolios, I finished each meeting on site with a reminder about their visual metaphors. A couple of them told me that there was no way they would have time, others promised and sent me their metaphors after a few months. Glenn contacted me many months after having had some digital issues. He had sent me an email that contained his reason for not being able to send his digital portfolio visual metaphor, however, I never received that email. It had disappeared. The following day he sent me a text, with two screen shots of his desktop. The screen text read in red caps, WARNING. Following in black bold text, ‘we have encrypted your files with Crypt0L0cker virus’. Further down the page, a blue hyperlink box of text containing ‘Click here to pay for files recovery’. The second photo read, ‘Buy decryption and get all your files back’ - How?  Bitcoin. He had sent his visual metaphor for artist some time before, but having had his computer locked and stolen he was unable to work or access his files. He said that these screenshots “best describes my hate relationship with the digital world”.
 
In Victoria, the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (2014) published ‘Unlocking the Potential: A digital learning strategy for Victorian learning and development settings’. This artefact summarises and outlines the Government’s plan to build and develop digital learning in order to improve learning outcomes in schools. It proposes three interconnected themes:

• “Unlocking learning potential: Curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and reporting enabled, supported, extended and re-imagined by what digital technologies make possible.
• Harnessing technology for learning: Ensuring access and connectivity, optimising learning by leveraging the technology environment to deliver flexible options, and providing practical advice to inform local investment and planning decisions.
• Changing learning culture: Strengthening leadership, capacity building and promoting and adopting evidence-based practice and partnerships” (p.3).

 
Building the skills, attributes and competencies for the digital space are necessary cultural, critical and communicative literacies and capabilities for the future. Digital literacies when combined with visuacies and creativity in art education offer a place to consider the needs of the visual worlds that we live and study in as artists. Our discipline is positioned to contextualise and conceptualise the teaching of digital literacies in visuacy as we help to shape our student’s self and cultural identity. 

Glenn Smith 

This A/R/T Portfolio is an art object, a pedagogical object, an affect of a digital living inquiry. In wonderland, the boundaries are blurred, intertwined and braided into educational models and theories. through a/r/tography to create a site within this site to invite an understanding of rhizomatic and creative teaching. What if young people designed their own learning? Asked Bill Lucas and Megan O’Connell (2016). “Teaching for creativity involves the development of a personal disposition to act in socially aware ways and adventurousness to re-imagining and recreating the world, rather than reproduction of the world” (Allen, 2015, p. 14). My understanding of portfolios comes from experience in a discipline that inherently understands creativity and the idea of presenting both process and product for an audience led by the artist-student in an authentic and personalised learning ecology. As a curated dissertation in wonderland, it is a serendipitous and relational learning space of openings, reverberations. A living inquiry rendered in storied opportunities that allow artist-students and their teachers to design their own learning and record, archive and exhibit their art journey in wonderland.

Created as an artefact of a/r/tography, in the excesses of knowledge, understanding and skills in art and the digital. Wonderland is a more than what lies here rendered in the excess, it is an embodied understanding of self as artist, researcher and teacher woven into my pedagogy, intertwined throughout the chapters of this dissertation to intervene, teach and democratise art making that underpin this living inquiry. In this A/R/T Portfolio site, I am an artist in wonderland curating and publishing my a/r/tographic explorations as an intervention. Each chapter is a digital bridge to make visible what it is we do in the studio classroom, to what it is we can curate in the digital through a storied pedagogy. For bell hooks cited in Hill, Fitzgerald, Haack, and Clayton (2005), “creating a classroom where the students know they are learning a particular story coming from a real person opens up the possibility for critical thinking. This approach allows students to question professors and encourages professors to join their students in the learning process” (p.43). This shared a/r/tographic pedagogy is designed, not as a syllabus, but an a/r/tographical artefact as a provocation to formal curriculum, a creative pedagogy to sit neatly alongside state and national policies. It is an opening, to intercede in standardised and linear learning progression for students to develop skills, knowledge and experiences as artists through artmaking and responding in portfolios. It is an opening to new contexts, new reverberations and new a/r/t. “We need pedagogies that are open to the irreducible singularity of what happens; pedagogies that can be fed and nourished by the surprise of the unexpected. Such pedagogies would then be pedagogies of the event within their respective functioning contexts” (Atkinson, 2012, p.17).

Moving from a curriculum to currere

“To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you're going so that you better understand where you are now so that the steps you take are always in the right direction” (Covey, 1989, p.1).
 
Wiggins and McTighe (1998) vindicate learning design that is backward designed. Backward design identifies the desired evidence of learning before designing the concepts or ideas to be explored. They ask that we design learning based on “What should students know, understand, and be able to do? What is worthy of understanding? What enduring understandings are desired?” (p.2). The culminating assessment in this currere in Wonderland is an authentic, curated and personalised artist-student portfolio where students design and develop a digital portfolio that reflects their artist identity through the curation of work developed over time in a space of rhizomatic learning. In wonderland, learning is personalised and reflective of the serendipitous line that learning leads through through person, process, practice, product and place ‘making’ as creative practitioners. This Portfolio as product offers a site to develop an understanding of the shift from aesthetic to conceptual awareness as artist through a professional context as an authentic, real world, living inquiry. The currere has an emphasis on creating a relational and digital site that renders possibilities for creative practice and art encounters as becoming events, captured and curated in the portfolio. 

My experience and understanding of Portfolios been a becoming event of its own. The metacognitive experience and acquisition of knowledge about self through the structuring, building and curating of one’s own knowledge, practice and experience from a collection of new and older processes and products in a Portfolio is affirming. It is life changing and only found in the excess in “what lies outside the acceptable” (Irwin & Springgay, 2008).   Through a digital documentation of process and synthesis of thoughts, through reflection on learning archives, the ability to see and notice the common threads of practice has created new thinking about praxis. New understanding and knowledge of the digital and an embodied understanding of working in digital spaces and portfolio pedagogies, shifting the gaze. Exploring creativity through a digital portfolio affects your metacognitive knowledge (Pintrich, 2002). 
 
This knowledge presents the creative practitioner with a reflection on identity, where the portfolio performs and embodies the site for developing an understanding about the difference between private, personal and public as an artist. Designing and curating a portfolio is an art encounter. Just as my physical curation of work was in Blackheath an encounter with visual culture; with art as creative expression (Lowenfeld, 1957; 1960); with art as creative problem solving (Eisner, 2002) and, with art as a socially constructed site, located within a cultural web (Anderson, 1997, p.72), it too has been here where I have found digital learning, while embodying and performing digital artist, researcher, teacher and curator. 

As Unlocking the Potential (2014) indicates, “in spite of the richness of educational content available online, particular skills are needed to identify, locate, organise and make effective use of the resources made possible by digital technologies. Information and support are needed to navigate digital content online and identify quality-assured tools and resources” (2014, p.6). In art education we have a rich digital community in the public digital archives of museums, galleries, libraries and artist sites to support our teaching of digital literacies and visuacy through reflection on our own practice in digital portfolios. The art world’s public digital archives have created openings in curated collections on all sides of our worlds. These digital collections are open sites in the rhizomatic space of the digitised world that open the dialogue and opportunity for artists to unlock the potential of the digital themselves and curate their stories outside of the gallery systems. 

This a/r/tographic pedagogy is designed for the a/r/t explorer, to be adapted to suit the needs of its audience, context and purpose for the artist-teacher, teacher artist, teacher of art and artist-student through my a/r/tographic praxis. As Bourriard (2004) called upon, “the forms that the artist presents to the public does not constitute an artwork until they are actually used and occupied by people” (p.46). The lens of a/r/tography offers new ways of seeing how an artist's portfolio is an object, a relational aesthetic and valued artefact that is researched, presented through curation and didactic in nature, yet participatory as a tool for art education. When I set out through the door into the garden on this journey in wonderland, I wanted to develop something to support my colleagues, but underlying that necessity or passion was the artist-student. In the excess of a/r/tography this living portfolio is a gallery of rendered and curated art, research and pedagogy in the digital. It is “an interstitial space, open and vulnerable where meanings and understandings are interrogated and ruptured” (Irwin & Springgay, 2008, p.xx). This A/R/T Portfolio site is designed to present and publish my (creative)a/r/tographic explorations in a space for intervention, provocation and relationaltity to map the many stories and images found in the excesses of wonderland.