Adelaide Biennial: Inner Sanctum

Lillian O’Neil Using found imagery from pre-digital books and magazines, Lillian O’Neil makes collages that weave together fragments of the past to form new scenarios and narratives. For Inner Sanctum, O’Neil has created a new series that considers ideas about the self and a multiplicity of selves, or split selves, experienced during ‘matrescence’, a term coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael to describe the time of mother-becoming. For O’Neil, night is the pivotal period in early motherhood, when women observe and experience new intimacies. In the new works, we see the fragments of women lying down, sleeping or caught in states...