Eroded Narrative: The Strata of Coastal Memory and the Materiality of In-Betweenness investigates the material and intellectual aspects of diasporic identity, memory, and in-betweenness through painting. The project, which is based on practice-led research, relies on postcolonial theory, diaspora studies, and Third Culture Kid (TCK) discourse to investigate identity as a layered and constantly re-formed phenomenon, rather than a fixed origin or eventual destination. Through the notions of the Third Space , border-translation, and the right to opacity , this thesis argues that painting can communicate the complexity of displacement and belonging through material process as well as through representation.
Working primarily with watercolour, gouache, and coloured pencil on paper, this body of paintings explores how erosion, sedimentation, layering, bleeding, and fixing can generate a visual language of memory. In this perspective, water represents mobility, time and translation, but stone represents memory condensation that resists disappearing. The removal of the horizon line further produces disorientation as a spatial and perceptual strategy, refusing stable overview and linear narratives of migration. Rather than presenting diasporic experience as transparent or totally readable, the work uses opacity as both an ethical and artistic strategy, enabling memory to be fractured, fragmentary, and unresolved.
The thesis exhibition extends these themes into the gallery space, where repeating shapes of coast, stone, blur, and strata are addressed through installation, interval, and spectator interaction. Painting is positioned throughout the thesis not as a representation of theory, but as a technique of inquiry that materializes identity, displacement, and memory . Ultimately, this research proposes that diasporic subjectivity may be understood not as a problem to be resolved, but as a changing coastal stratum that is continually destroyed and rebuilt through time, relation, and material process.