Ambiguous Loss

Abstract

This thesis emerges from lived experience following my son’s continued and prolonged disappearance due to drug addiction and the uncertainty it produced within my family. Rather than treating this condition as trauma requiring resolution, I situate the work within Dr. Pauline Boss’s concept of ambiguous loss. Her framework describes a form of loss with no clear ending, in which absence and presence coexist. My studio practice takes the position that conventional art-historical symbols of grief and mourning are inadequate for representing such loss because they presume a narrative of closure. The work therefore develops conceptual, material, and spatial relationships to represent this type of loss. My studio process begins with concepts surrounding ambiguous loss, particularly boundary ambiguity and ambivalence. Rather than translating these ideas into classic narratives or symbolic representations, I consider how conditions exist as a certain interior condition such as openness, flexible sense of agency, fluid self-definition, tolerated ambivalence, reoriented attachments, embracing a non-linear sense of the future My material exploration follows from these interior conditions. Paintings and ceramics operate as embedded sites of inquiry in which ambivalence, permeability, instability, vulnerability, indeterminacy, and tension can be tested and visualized. Porcelain was researched because of the emotions evoked by its delicacy and luminosity. Porcelain registers vulnerability and instability, allowing form to hold a provisional solidity and even the sorrow of ambiguous loss. At first my material choices are not predetermined; multiple possibilities are explored until correspondences emerge between concept, felt condition, and material behavior. Creating installations that combine realistic figurative paintings with abstract ceramic forms makes boundary ambiguity perceptible between two and three-dimensional works, as well as between realism and abstraction. Works are placed in deliberate proximity so that the viewer does not interpret each work independently. Instead, meaning emerges through space rather than narrative explanation. This thesis contributes to contemporary art discourse by articulating conceptual, material, and spatial strategies through which ambiguous loss can be represented without illustration or the narrative of closure.