#6 Where Dreams Took Shape: My Life at TAFE

Welcome back to The Incidental Artist! This blog is a chronicle of my art journey: the missteps, the breakthroughs, the moments that made me feel alive. If you’ve ever felt like you didn’t belong in the world you were handed, you’re in good company.

Grab a cuppa, scroll slowly, and stay awhile.

For someone who detested school, enjoying TAFE felt like a revelation.

At the Northern Metropolitan Institute of TAFE, I was finally free to dive headfirst into creativity, life drawing, painting, analogue photography, and printmaking. Even the “business of art” was part of the curriculum.

Growing up, we had no art in the house. My mother, a talented seamstress, was creative in her own way, but galleries weren’t part of our world. As a child, I remember going on one lone school excursion to a gallery, where I stood bewildered among quiet paintings, asking myself; Why are we here?

Highschool art classes were disheartening. Most teachers were indifferent, even cruel. But those rare moments, sketching quietly, discovering I loved to work with my hands, hinted at something real. At TAFE that flicker was ignighted.

I was working full-time evening shifts at a lab while studying full-time at TAFE. Eventually, exhaustion caught up. I’d drift off in classes, and I had to make a difficult decision. I could quit the job… or quit my dream. TAFE was my sustenance, so I chose art.

My workplace generously offered holiday employment, and I clung to that support while immersing myself deeper into the course. Among all the subjects, printmaking and photography captivated me most. Maybe it was the alchemy, inks and chemicals and uncertainty that echoed my lab experience.  

I gravitated toward experimentation, layering emotion into process. And in that space, something clicked. For the first time in my life, I felt a sense of belonging.

Share a moment when you felt like you truly belonged in a creative space. Share in the comments below.

Here are some images I made in the second year at TAFE, where I continued to experiment with drawing, but introduced other mediums such as watercolour and guache.