Session 7: Art and Mourning, Consolation and Well-Being
Chair: Sara de Jong


The Creative Space
Anne Riggs
Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

This paper reflects upon a ‘Creative Space’, and what such a space can provide after sexual abuse and the distortions, losses and grief that accompany this trauma. The traumatic journey to this creative space is hardly welcome, but within its sanctuary, the burden of trauma can be shared and lightened – comfort and care given and received through the process of creating, the work of the artist, and exchanges between members of the group.

I will discuss the uniqueness of the ‘creative space’, and what I see can be its contribution to the restoration of trust, intimacy and connection to self and community through :

• The processes of creation – the use of metaphor, building artistic skills and understanding.
• What the artist brings to and receives from this experience, the artist’s preparedness to carry some of the weight of trauma and what is required to ensure the weight does not overwhelm.
• What service this model and the arts can offer the traumatised and grieving in the provision of care – perhaps a space to grieve, the tools to feel connected and a place for recognition and support.

I will bring to the discussion 20 years arts practice – much of which has been spent exploring grief and loss.  The paper will be accompanied by slides of mosaic artworks created during the research.

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Dresses my Mother Wore: A Poetics of Mourning
Pip Stokes
University of Melbourme, Australia

This paper and images of an installation of art work entitled Dresses My Mother Wore, addresses themes of loss and absence, giving material expression to Merleau Ponti’s concept of ‘embodiment/disembodiment’ as a way of perceiving the feminine condition.

I look at questions of perceived feminine ‘madness’, creativity and repression in the light of an installation of paper, beeswax, and silk ‘dresses’ and rose thorn branches cast in bronze.   These feminine ‘garments’ – empty skin-like structures, evoke an absence but are also a meditation on the repressive history of the dress itself. 

This work employs traditional dressmaking skills to construct a perverse form of dressmaking: it undoes the perfection of a ‘finished’ dress with processes and materials antithetical to ‘women’s craft’, such as tearing, binding and knotting or steeping materials in beeswax to make unnatural, translucent membrane-like ‘skins’.   The ‘dress’ becomes an effacement, a disembodiment.  Through a remnant, a fragment dress, the unpresentable is presented.

Mourning and remembrance as aspects of care are addressed in this paper.  The work in its materialization of these aspects of the human condition also gestures toward consolation and solicitude in its meditative and labor intensive processes, resonant with the rites and rituals of liminal transition and materials  from the bees, symbolic of healing.

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