Grief, Creativity, and Ambiguity: The ‘as if’ of Artistic Play

Abstract This article suggests that artworks can capture the ambiguity and ambivalence of grief, accommodating complex emotions from the artist’s lived experience without the need to resolve or rationalize them. Focusing on visual artist Helen Acklam, it explores how creative activities give expression to the atemporal and uncanny aspects of grief, in which the dead are felt to be both present and absent, beloved and abject. In cases of disenfranchised grief, artworks also provide a means to rewrite the narrative of a death and have grief socially acknowledged. My article thus supports Thomas Fuchs’s observation that ambiguity is central in grief. However, whereas he focuses on how ambiguity is resolved, I emphasize how it can be accommodated and communicated through creativity and art. Through attention to the art object, we can enter into the griever’s experience. Art in this way allows for a particularly vivid and experiential form of witnessing.