STATEMENT

My artwork is a series of drawings about kombucha. Kombucha is a fermented, slightly alcoholic, lightly effervescent, sweetened black or green tea drink commonly intended as a functional beverage for its supposed health benefits. I depict the living organism’s developmental movements through shape, color, and size by using oil on canvas and watercolor. To be specific, I use kombucha as the main idea to imply my theory in my paper that is the Multiple Intelligence (MI) theory which indicated that students have different individual intelligence profiles, even if they grow up with the same background and in the same environment. Personally, I had been trained to prepare standardized tests even in the visual art subject for K-12 years, so I want to use realistic oil painting to represent my K-12 artistic education, and access abstract watercolor drawings to conduct my college education in Italy.

I was inspired by Tianyue Su’s artwork 2nd Connect. She is an artist at the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. 2nd Connect is a bio-art piece that uses SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast), glassware and a vibration motor. After I watched her artwork, I talk with her. She said, she put these kombuchas in the same environment, but they grew differently. I use this idea in my own artwork to present my teaching theory and pedagogy. As teachers, it is important to recognize that despite some similarities such as gender, age, socioeconomic background, each young person with whom we work is an individual with different needs. It is like the development of kombucha: even though we provide the same environment for children, they may grow up differently. This theory gives me a strong voice against the standardized education I experienced. I want to use the idea of MI theory in my art lessons motivating and assessing them based on their needs, interests and intelligence profiles. For kombucha, the vessel is essential because as they develop in different containers, they become different shapes, the same as children; the “container” or the teaching environment will shape their forms too. To express more directly, I collaborate with Tianyue. I hang my artwork on the wall, and she put some kombucha she grew in front of my artwork.