ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a conversation with the artist/writer/performer Katarina Ranković, whose work is inspired by the question of personhood, which she addresses through the guise of fictional characters. Katarina tells the story of how she used her art practice to overcome her inner critic, recover her confidence and find her voice as an artist. She also offers insights on how she developed a method of setting up her art practice as an investigation, which has enabled her to set aside unhelpful judgements about her artworks. The author’s response is to explore a range of artists’ accounts on their own sources of inspiration from women including Gubar, who suggested women’s creativity is often inspired by their desire to give visibility and representation to the wounds inflicted upon them by their historic exclusion and silence within a patriarchal culture. Gubar suggests that this means going back into the history of women’s collective and personal wounds and making work that reimagines those experiences. The author reflects on their own inspirations, located in their family, and invites the reader to reclaim one of their own stories by reimagining it as a story or painting and to use this reimagining to make it their own.
