Bic Tieu | Objects in-between: designing a visual language for traversing personal identity, migration and intercultural spaces.

Bic Tieu is a designer, object maker and jeweller. She is interested in ways objects are holders to stories, cultures, and knowledge. Her identity is connected to her migrant past and Southeast Asian-Australian women with Chinese, Vietnamese and Australian up bringing. Bic's works draws on traditional and contemporary craft and design methods inspired by her Asian-cultural lineages to investigate themes of personal and cross-cultural narratives. Specialising in metal technologies, manufacturing processes, traditional Vietnamese and Japanese lacquer, her practice often utilises a synthesis of these materials with design strategies to create new perspectives on contemporary object making and meanings. Recent work has used cartographic ways to explore the 'in-between'. By investigating into new kinds of cultural objects that are representative of the hybrid cultures, life experiences and identity represented in the diverse cultures in Australia, Bic's practice revel in materiality expressed in object-based forms to create better understanding of cultural diversity, decolonisation and the Asia-Australia context.

"My PhD project draws on the material culture around contemporary design and craft traditions to articulate identity from an intercultural context. These ideas are framed within the intercultural context of place, home and object. Personal collections of objects are analysed through taxonomy to synthesise interdisciplinary studio investigations combining graphic animations with contemporary jewellery and object processes to develop a visual system that examines cross-cultural translations. Central to the research is the notion of hybridity as a 'third space' informed by my personal narratives and identity as a migrant living in Sydney, Australia. I connect the research to broader theory of third space identity by writings of diaspora intellectuals: Ien Ang, Homi Bhabha, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Nikos Papastergiadis. In addition to this I also connect with object theory to argue how objects can shape and reflect identity. Framed by these theoretical contexts I explore concepts of movement, migration and identity from multiple cultural perspectives of Australian, Chinese and Vietnamese heritage. Through deconstructing these ideas, I define my sense of intercultural hybridity in order to extend common and relatable strategies for designing a visual language that articulates my third space identity. My final series of metal object-based works are tangible evocations of liminality as manifestations of my experience as a Southeast Asian-Australian woman and further represent a perspective of Australia's unique complex cultural realities."

Bic Tieu is a Higher Degree Research Candidate, completing her Doctor of Philosphy at ANU School of Art & Design.

Exhibition continues 1 - 14 April 2022.