Arlene Tucker
Areas of expertise: visual arts, education, semiotics, intercultural communication
Working languages: Finnish, English
Contact info: arlene.dearyou(a)gmail.com
Links: arlenetucker.net, translationisdialogue.org
Arlene Tucker is an artist and educator, and her work focuses on adding play elements to daily life through her art. Inspired by translation studies and animals she finds ways to connect and make meaning in our shared environments. Her process-based artistic work creates spaces and situations for exchange, dialogue, and transformations to occur and surprise all players. She is interested in creating projects that open up ideas and that engage the viewer; that invite the viewer to be a part of the narrative or art creation process. In translation, your participation continues to propel the story.
Tucker has a BFA from the Savannah College of Art & Design in USA and a Masters in Semiotics from Tartu University in Estonia. Tucker’s master’s thesis, Meaningful Play: Applying Zoosemiotics to game development (2011), finds an approach to re-instilling play into the human world and utilizes the communication process as a methodology for understanding. Her chapter, ‘Translation is Dialogue: Language in Transit’ was published in Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders: Intersemiotic Journeys between Media (Editors: Campbell, Madeleine, Vidal, Ricarda, 2019).
Tucker comes from a multicultural, multilingual and multiracial family, which has given her the insight and motivation to seek how we can better listen to each other and live together more peacefully. In addition to her roots in Taiwan and the USA she has lived in Belgium, Czech Republic and Estonia. Tucker has been based in Helsinki, Finland since 2011.
“My immersion in various places across the globe and now Finland has given me insight to myriad ways of living, communicating, and appreciating. Making meaning from an orchestra of foreign sounds and contextualizing new signs are a part of the pursuit of my dream to discover, create and build with and for people.”
Greetings from Diversity Agent 2.0 course coordinator
