After a long illness, my mother died on December 21, 2022. Having continuously watched pieces of her disappear over 9 years, the final death felt like a resolution: it wasn’t.
My current practice is heavily ritualistic. The meditative writing of poetry to clarify my emotions and where I am working from is paired with carefully constructed playlists; music keeps me connected to the work’s spirit.
Honest introspection and acceptance is key. Born in western society, where grief and death are still fairly taboo subjects, I seek to walk through the discomfort and confront myself and a society that would pathologize grievers to maintain its own comfort. I resist societal expectations through honest representation of my grief experience and join the conversion around the efficacy of western grief practices, harkening to writings such as The Bleeding Tree by Hollie Starling and It’s Like A Tattoo: Rethinking Common Discourses on Grief by Robyn L. Ord.
I use occult and folk imagery to convey the distance between societal expectation and personal need. Within my practice, I am fulfilling “... this human need for the comfort of categorising and by naming our fears, conquering them” (Starling, 2023). I aim to recognize the facets of my grief such as anxiety, loss of identity, transformation, and bodily or psychological change. I express these aspects through sculptural artifacts formed of acrylic paint on live edge wood, wire wrapped in knotted cotton cord, and clay, these materials, natural and man-made, serving as my ingredients for ritual.