DAISY PILLAY University of KwaZulu-Natal Email: Pillaygv@ukzn.ac.za Recreating a Graduate Supervisor through Art Making An Autoethnographic Study INTRODUCTION What happens when we use artful methods to turn our gaze onto the autobiographic self of the graduate supervisor? How do pathways of self-inquiry change? And for whom? What self-knowledge do those paths engender? In my arts-based research scholarship, I have examined how visual and literary art forms open up imaginative spaces for self- reflexivity and complex ways of thinking and being. 1 Art-making can serve as imaginative entry points to awaken creative, materially situated, and practical modes for researching supervision pedagogy in higher education. Visual modes like drawing, painting, sculpture, and collage can employ the powers of creativity to know the self in surprising ways. 2 According to Pahl, Roswell, Bartlett, and Vasudevan 3 (2010 ), the visual offers space where personal, untold stories can be experienced and expressed materially and practi- cally—and space for “unknowing,” 4 taken-for-granted notions of the supervisor self. As South Africans, we can use visual modes as an ethical practice to “[look] the beast of the [apartheid] past in the eye ... in order not to allow it to imprison us.” 5 Twenty-five years into our democracy, we continue to experience the residues of brutal, racist apartheid rule. The beast of the past lingers and, as higher education teachers and students in South Africa, we continue to experience the effects of decades of intellectual, social, and cultural impoverishment of education. Knowing the self through emotion and body, 6 within the realm of autoethnography, provides new insights into the stories of everyday lived experience. In this article, I show how working with artworks I composed facilitated a different understanding of my supervision pedagogy. Visual modes, as inquiry and representation for autoethnographic research, offered potent possibilities for cultivating a different understanding of supervi- sion pedagogy in South African public higher education institutions. 99 Journal of Autoethnography, Vol. 1 , Number 1 , pp. 99 –104 , e-ISSN 2637 -5192  2020 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10 .1525 /joae.2020 .1 .1 .99