**3. The inquiry into visual borderlands**

The ethics-approved longitudinal inquiry looked at the artmaking practices of gifted secondary school students between the ages of 15 and 17 years (n = 108). The students were selected to participate in a first-year 2-D fine art course at an Australian regional university. The course focuses on visual reasoning, arts-based inquiry as a research [52–54]. Students were selected across a range of regional secondary schools.


Students were given the opportunity to do an individual arts-based research project where they take a personal problem-centred approach to their inquiry. Broadly, this inquiry focuses on the transdisciplinary meaning-making processes of young visual art students and how they approach and explore a scientific concept or phenomenon of choice, through arts-based research. Students have been selected by their art teachers, interviewed, and subsequently invited to enrol in the university course while concurrently doing their school studies. Students keenly accepted the challenge of the additional workload because generally, they saw learning through imaging acts as a preferred way to learn. The inquiry into the art-science learning in the gifted education program has run at the university from 2015 to 2019. The students draw on their school-based science learning and personal scientific interests, but drive their inquiry through individual troubling about self, art, the world, and their own expressive meaning-making processes. This chapter draws on the work previously done on visual borderlands [1] and considers how performative artification operates in the works of two students, Charlotte and Aynsley. They are two of the gifted visualisers.

The inquiry *applies a* Deleuzoguattarian lens and draws on arts-informed qualitative inquiry research methods [55, 56]. It presents the learning as material, non-linear, non-hierarchical, unstable, shifting, mobile, and multiple forms of knowledge [57–59]. The data sources informing the inquiry include the student artworks, their visual diaries as performative sites, student surveys as reflective insights, student focus group interviews, and audience survey feedback collected at each final exhibition. In this chapter, consideration is given to how students engage at subject borders between self, art, science, and their broader sociocultural world. In particular, it will consider how the students traverse the boundaries between arts and science**,** how they draw on different artistic and scientific representations and apply visual semiotic and artified pedagogies.

#### **3.1 Visual borderlands as artified assemblages: Charlotte and Ansley**

This section explores the intersections between the student artefacts from the arts-informed interpretive inquiry and embeds the concepts from the literature in seeking to extend the definition of visual borderlands as a liminal art-science transdisciplinary meaning-making space. This lens brings to bear the shifts in thinking about what constitutes a learner's scientific identity amplifying the voices around the semiotic work that folds across learning assemblages in both visual education and science learning**.** The analysis looks at Aynsley and Charlotte's personal inquiry into their selected scientific phenomenon. It considers their unique problem-centred learning processes identified in the artefact analysis. These artefacts provide glimpses into the students' ideation and incorporeal thinking which Deleuze describes as the process which is indivisible, and ideation brings forth effects transferred into their artmaking. It will look at connections to past and present semiotic meanings with consideration of their future-oriented subjectivities at the boundaries between arts and science.

#### *3.1.1 Aynsley*

The work of Ansley connects us immediately to the world of entomology. A study of her final drawing below pulls an audience into considering the connections and relationships between humans and insects. Is the question she wishes the audience to ask or to consider, the evolutionary, ecological, and biodiversity issues that face humanity? Where does this question sit, in science or sociocultural inquiry? Will the evidence offer opportunities to consider what a contemporary learning culture of the science classroom might look like?

Aynsley's artist statement below sees her dwell on issues of vulnerability for humanity, the world of living things, and the environment.

*My study demonstrates the relationship of art verses science through the study of entomology…combining butterflies and the human form. As an artist my goal was to express the unique nature and vulnerability of each and everyone of us…these artworks symbolise beauty and how it defines us. We are all equal… it shows how people can interpret beauty in different ways…. For some, the wings could be the focus point and others would believe the eyes capture the viewers opinion on appearance (Aynsley: Artist Statement, 2018).*

For Aynsley, there appears to be no separation between humanity and nature, no species hierarchy, all be this is not clearly articulated in her artist statement, but
