Joanna Kambourian "Hirosuhi (Heroine)"

Joanna Kambourian is an Australian born designer, printmaker and visual artist of Armenian heritage. Through a variety of mediums, digital prints, serigraphy, and 3D works, Joanna explores motifs, imagery, ideas and crafts typically from Armenian Culture; re-represented in a more familiar, current context. Her work continues to document an ongoing journey, a search for identity and belonging from a multicultural perspective that crosses generations and encompasses the diasporic experience. Her work illustrates this complex heritage through a multidisciplinary practice.

This print is one of a series of altered and appropriated images of Armenian women in traditional costume, readily available on the internet, referencing my ‘digital’exploration to find more about what it means to be Armenian. My introduced patterned overlays, are intended to be reminiscent of the rugs that so famously come from the areas where my ancestors fled in 1915 – Khapert, Ottoman Turkey. The image deliberately concealed, obscured, fragmented, and digitally artifacted – much is lost in the translation. “…even as it is impossible to describe exhaustively and in its totality what “Armenian” is in Armenian identity, I suggest, it is the connections, the relationships, the occasions in diasporic life in the 21st century that makes a piece of music or a painting, or literature or a bowl of harissa “Armenian.” It is the memory, thought and message that a cultural object or creation represents that makes it “Armenian” by connecting it to a meaning system that is larger than an individual’s personal world.”

Unframed Archival Digital Print/Photomontage on Hahnemuehle Photo Rag 300gsm

61 x 82.5 cm