A Complete Disavowal: Sophia Whitney Hewson

Sophia Hewson has been examining gender inequality for 20 years as a professional practicing artist, she has experienced domestic violence, and has worked as a support worker at W.I.R.E. (a womxn’s refuge) in Melbourne from 2016-2018 (where she supported womxn who experience family violence). She is now a member at the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis and a qualified psychotherapist (2023).

This exhibition addresses the complexity of practising feminist principles within the dynamics of conflict, both on a domestic scale and in large scale political conflicts.

It teases out the difficulties inherent in navigating arguments when there are pre-intrenched power structures at play. It highlights the validity of these difficulties for womxn and provides a platform to justify such perspectives.  'A Complete Disavowel' queries what is said and not said in such situations, suggesting that the reduced severity of what is ultimately expressed by womxn points to the internalization of shared cultural and community misogyny often rendering self-doubt or confusion in the speaker.

A Complete Disavowel by Sophia Hewson

Exhibition Text by Tara Heffernan  

Art, in its traditional, mimetic function, was most often created in service of the narcissism of power. The aesthetic garnish of the ruling class, military powers or political revolutions, these sculptural forms were shaped in the guise of leaders, figureheads or Gods. Unlike their human subjects, these bodies of stone, clay or bronze travel through time, surviving the atrocities of the ages they withstand. Nodding to the human drive to remember, to memorialise, Sophia Hewson’s A Complete Disavowal reimagines traditional sculpture in our hyperreal image age.  

Figurative sculptures collapse into each other, or dangle from the ceiling, while a textured sheet — a relief sculpture of water in stasis — is suspended from above. The fragmented rectangle of ocean, with joins visible in its surface that vaguely echo the folds of a traditional Coromandel screen, isn’t trying to convince you of its realism, but rather, flaunt the markers of its contrivance. That the sheet of ocean isn’t wall mounted is key: it faces forward, but its backside isn’t concealed. The frame of metal from which it hangs is entirely conspicuous. Rather than a scene or a story, it is a fragment of the rippled surface of the ocean. It could be any ocean, any water. In this non-descript status, it seems to refer simply to “the ocean” — to the ocean as a concept. A hyperreal reflection of the mysterious expanses of water that separate us, the ocean obliquely references the boarders and barriers to human empathy and understanding. Rather than out of sight, out of mind, however, our current image age delivers moving images across the ocean, live in high definition.    

Far from abject, this calamitous symphony of limbs, torsos, and heads speak of the unconscious acknowledgement of human fragility and connectedness. Superficially resembling the bodies of Pompeii, at a distance, these forms recall knots, insects or sea-creatures. For example, Untitled (descent) resembles a giant hand with fingers splayed. The sculpture is composed of two legs and an arm raised in the air, while a human head juts from the base like a bulbous thumb. In one sense, such a sculptural form tests our brain’s capacity to recognise the human anatomy by jumbling it. Beyond this, however, is a darker suggestion.   

In the psychoanalytic theory of Carl Jung, the "shadow self" refers to the hidden, unconscious aspects of our personality. These may be repressed, rejected, or otherwise concealed, though they persist, smuggling negative emotions, fears, desires, or traits that conflict with our conscious, developed self-image which is, conversely, shaped by social expectation and maintained to sustain our everyday experience, lest these horrors consume us.  

Hewson’s figurative abstractions seem to conjure the things that lurk in this shadow of consciousness. Perhaps the most ominous work is Untitled (Fear of committing a sin 2) (2025). An ominous pendant, a human head hangs by a chain from the ceiling. The androgenous, child-face, with subtle recesses for eyes, is frozen in a vague frown. This sculpture is based on the death mask of a Greek child cast over two thousand years ago. As a mother of small children, this relic holds particular resonances for Hewson. A tragedy that reaches through time here recalls the callousness of war and imperialism where the innocent are slaughtered and tiny bodies, like those over which we exercise extreme measures of protection, are obliterated, sometimes becoming pawns or casualties in wars both personal and political.   

Art itself is sometimes a reflection, sometimes a shadow. A testament to the fragility of minds, bodies and moral compasses, A Complete Disavowal plays with these shadows, casting light into the void, creating a brilliant chiaroscuro on the foremost spectres, while honouring the impenetrable darkness beyond.  
 
Tara Heffernan is an art historian and critic.