I seem to be always in conversation with myself. That must be the crux of all of this; of all my material attempts. I am trying to understand what it means to be alive and reckoning with the passage of time; with this comes much about death, aging—a lot of fear really. I’m trying to not be so afraid. So, I’m not sure, really, how ‘successful’ I can ever be in my work. I am chasing something that can’t be grasped—too slippery. I have given up on thinking my work will ever do what I am searching for, not wholly. And that is good, it keeps me going. I think we are all feeling the same things, we just can’t always find the [words].
There is no beating around the bush; my grandmother died. Most of this work is for her; for me.
I read Melissa Febos’ ‘Body Work’ back in October—same time as the Wales residency—and I became fixated on marrying the personal to the universal. [Though perhaps I was always fixated and just didn’t have the proper terminology yet]. She reinforced that my only hope of tapping universality in my work was to get extremely up in my own shit [that feels like the best way to say it]. There were consequent outpourings of poetry and compulsively shot rolls of film. I was categorizing as a means of trying to understand the internal transformation I could feel happening. The first few visits to my grandmother I only wanted to photograph her. The visit which I subconsciously knew was the last, albeit in denial, all I could photograph was everything around her. In retrospect I can see this as a critical shift in perspective and burgeoning articulation of the self as constituent parts reflected in that which surrounds us; a negative cast; when I look at a photo of the silo by our house, I see her.
As I interrogated in my CP3, ‘grief events’ thrust us into a transformative period where the world as we know it critically changes and thus throws our understanding of self into flux. I have been compelled by east Asian philosophies on the ‘self’, such as in the book ‘The Oneness Hypothesis’ and I began to contextualize that I was viewing my ‘self’ in terms of my grandmother, parallel to collectivist views on the self as ‘who we are to others ‘. Her terminal cancer and imminent bodily disappearance threw me out to sea. I began to take the pre-existing ‘house’ motif in my work (representative of the construction of ‘self’) and contextualize it to the grief event. If I am a house, Grief is a hallway I move through; one way movement; spat back out to a world that looks the same but has been irrevocably changed.
She died two hours after I called to tell her I had submitted the essay.
It was from this point on that I threw everything I had into creating my degree show work A Duck Swam from San Francisco to Portugal and Never Got Wet. It is the embodiment of the ‘grief hallway’, and the concept was highly ambitious and a big risk to take knowing the time frame and required processes to realize it. Upon reflection the project was at times a coping mechanism to handle the grief I was experiencing, a pattern I have noticed in all of the work I feel most strongly compelled to make; the hardest things to cope with personally become my necessitated subject matter.
My idea of wax balloons filling the hallway came from thinking about ideas of hope, wax as preservation, and perverse celebration. To achieve this, I dedicated extensive time in the plaster workshop to invent a way of making a three-part mould to cast my balloons. In all my research no one had done it before, so it took me and Diane trialing over and over to make it work. This experience strengthened my patience and understanding of the materials and led to new lines of inquiry—a sort of maternal bond began to form between me and the balloon, both visually in the act of making, and emotionally. I can see a critical link between this, my conception of ‘Mother’: The Lesbian Bread Project, and the underpinning of the grief hallway; "what is a mother?". The phrases on the balloons were sourced from pouring through grief support pages and collecting a list of consolation terms; I am interested in the collective language we create around grief and reinforce through wide-spread reiterations that feel both defaultly necessary and hollow.
In all the hallway’s textile work I have attempted to find the aesthetic line between the external and internal; in some respects, it feels like a burnt house, moldy walls, shoddy scaffolding, old wallpaper, broken windows. It is my hope that beyond these initial comparisons, the audience sees the more psychological, internal essence of the work being the walls of a mind, the walls of this psycho-philosophical grief hallway that I am moving through, of which we all have our respective versions. I believe this work is for anyone who thinks about loss as much as I do; loss of time, of people, of our understanding of self, and the yearning to retrieve. To see my work physicalized makes me feel less alone, and all I can hope is that it does the same for someone else.
I have been working to articulate these ideas since second year and I can confidently say that I feel this is the strongest outpouring yet. My favorite experimentations have been the flour Batik method I used to create skin like textures with crackled dye seeping through to the other side, I feel it is a very effective way to think of skin and aging without using the initially obvious materials such as latex. Additionally, the hand-painted font lettering of my poem ‘If I am a House’ when you initially enter the hallway is something I would like to push further now; my experience at Marc Hundley’s show in Glasgow greatly inspired me to think of my relationship to text as a painter, not just as a writer, and how text changes when it has been hand painted rather than screen-printed or sublimation printed. There is a different level of intimacy with the words when you spend that many hours painting their shapes, and I think this translates visually to the viewer.
Following all of the textile investigations, I am looking forward to taking much time and space to further the methods and let myself be playful with their outcomes. This degree has honed my drive, time management skills, and vision of what I would like my future to be in the arts. I will continue to work on my personal practice and pursue educational positions, curatorial positions, and I am interested in arts therapy. I feel ready to work intuitively and uphold the same rigour I have placed on myself to consistently ‘show up’ outside of University structure.
On a professional development level, I handed myself the task of developing and orchestrating ‘Mother’: The Lesbian Bread Project at the same time as all the degree show work. It was intense but incredibly rewarding. The project was hosted at PINK gallery and resulted in a continued relationship with both Katy Morrison who runs it, and the other artists exhibiting at that time. Working with the public, applying for a grant, organizing the project, hiring a videographer and photographer were all key skill developments that will help me in my future career plans. 'Mother' is in the works for Arts Council funding now and will continue as a series over time.
Thank you to everyone who has taught me, challenged me, lifted me, and let me lift them.