About Sonia Donnellan

Space of ambiguity: art transforming ambivalence and loss

My work addresses a mother's perspective concerning the nature of the mother/adolescent daughter relationship. More explicitly the PhD project attends to a mother's experience of emotional and psychological ambivalence as she separates from her adolescent daughter with this experience being represented through creative visual art practice. My work constructs a speculative critical framework centred on an exploration of maternal ambivalence specifically to do with separation from the adolescent daughter.

This speculative framework rests on two propositions:

1. emotional or psychological ambivalence is capable of being both expressively and critically registered in a work of art
2. creative visual art practice itself may enable the positive transformation of such states of emotional and psychological ambivalence.

My research concerning the nature of the mother/daughter relationship reveals there are relatively few works of art that have specifically taken the perspective of a mother, her ambivalence and the complexity of her relations and separation from an adolescent daughter. Psychoanalytic theories about separation of mothers and daughters from each other tend to focus on the daughters perspective, and position the maternal as being that which the daughter must struggle against.

Insights from Julia Kristeva's Black Sun and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex are developed within the written exegesis that accompanies the artwork to provide a theoretical framework for the project, and give an insight into an unconscious and conscious experience of ambivalence. The research develops Kristeva's ideas about affect, which is indexed to repressed loss and is theorised as the semiotic, to become a visual language in the chain of significations. Beauvoir's insights about the origins of a mothers ambivalence regarding the growing autonomy of an adolescent daughter are combined with her perspective of a work of art as a space of ambiguity (or the potential for art to create new meanings and values), to propose that a work of art may be a space in which a mothers ambivalence and loss may be transformed.

The artworks included on this webpage were created for an exhibition titled Hope shown in October 2007. The work manifests the speculative framework of a visual language for loss and ambivalence that is transforming. It is proposed that art as a space of ambiguity creates a possibility for becoming: the very fact that we can be transformed by what we encounter, or participate in, is a matter of hope, although one that doesn't promise anything (Zournazi 2002, p. 247).

Artist's CV (Word doc, 40kb)