Briana McCarthy

Western culture holds a great discomfort in relation to death and grief. The avoidance of conversation and confrontation around these subjects serves to pathologize and “other” the bereaved. The griever also pathologizes themselves in reaction to societal norms and expectations clashing with their personal needs and experience. Having experienced this myself, I have shifted into a state of resistance that entails actively seeking the shape and details of my own grief and honestly presenting that to an audience through my work and writing. I am accomplishing this through a ritual practice that centers around introspection through meditative writing.

Naming Grief

My practice is built upon a foundation of inward, personal examination. Folklore is a great influencing force in my work, so it is not surprising that a description of folklore, by folklorist Hollie Starling, so well describes an important facet of my current practice: “Folklore fulfils this human need for the comfort of categorising and by naming our fears, conquering them,” (2023, p. 231). My creative process and work is largely focused on reflecting upon and expressing my grief journey. To process my grief, I need to understand it and give it a face through my work. I target the individual elements: anxiety, shame, loss of self, loss of function (physical and mental), fear, anger, and any other beasts that rear up on me. The artworks themselves are artefacts, or markers, that show where I have been or where I am now. The artefact is important as a vessel for the things I am processing or exorcising: an expression of me but now brought to the light, made physical. If it is in front of me, I can face it, challenge it. I make my work public because if I am not the only audience, it eliminates my shame and helps me find community; others with similar wounds. It is important not to be alone, because in that space I act as society and “other” myself and my grief. In the naming and presenting the elements of my grief, I am not completely at the whim of this transformation and have a hand in reshaping myself. 

With How Monstrous If I Healed, I was working to understand the true feeling of the loss. What makes the loss of my Mother different from others? It culminates to the fact that I had never known a world without her. She was the first to love me. I knew her before I breathed air. She was my only world until I came screaming into this one, where she was the first to hold me and soothe me. Losing her was like losing a piece of myself…a limb. Hollie Starling describes it well in The Bleeding Tree, “Our brains hold an internal map of the body but following amputation this map isn't immediately updated to reflect the body's new reality,” (2023, p. 186). 

My mental and physical function changed in grief. Seemingly small tasks, like going to the grocery store or making small talk, demanded great effort. My spatial awareness and coordination lessened: I’ve been fumbling through the world like a newborn fawn, collecting bruises from every pointed edge, or word, I meet. I began wishing I had a way to signal to people why I was such a mess, hinting that it wasn’t always so (shame), without having to say it. How relieving it would be to throw on a black shawl and for society to know without having to speak it. Considering the maiming feeling of loss and the need for those around me to know what I am facing, the metaphor of cutting fingers, inspired by a passage from The Bleeding Tree, felt poignant. Our hands are used to express, fix, feed, love, and feel, yet I hardly give them a thought day to day; I would think of them often if they weren’t whole. Also, I needed the mourning wear to rawly express the magnitude of the loss; that feeling that I’ve lost pieces of myself along with my Mother. Keeping those pieces, the fingers, strung around my neck, is reflective of keeping my Mother’s memory close and remembering that I am still whole, even if I am different.

In Soft and Savage, I focus on the anxiety of grief. To remain a functioning member of society and not make others uncomfortable, I once put great effort into locking all the chaos of grief inside myself: a small cage for something so big. Anxiety often physically manifests as a feeling of restricted breathing: knots tightening around the chest, squeezing the lungs. The knot work on the outer rib cage is meant to bind everything within, but inside there is fraying and the spine is twisted and gnarled. It’s not just society that requires the binding: I need to express but also keep the grief close, for safety in society but also because it is a connection to my Mother. It is a binding of protection and a way to bind her memory and love to me. This grief is both soft and savage. 

Infestation examines shame and guilt. This mass of black, oily, writhing things pushing at the barrier, chewing holes and trying to wriggle out into the world represent all my grief. My feelings are in conflict: ashamed to be so hurt for so long, indignant at the idea that I should have shame for feeling this, needing to say it out loud and be known, needing to guard my soft underbelly and coveting the hurt.  I have the need for honesty. Any lie has always sat in my stomach like a jagged stone, even when a lie would be harmless, or a kindness to others. The grief experience has aggravated this trait. The kind and simple question of “how are you?” has been incredibly difficult to answer, in part, because the people asking want me to be okay because they care about me: the truth will make them sad and I don’t want that for them. In these cases, they genuinely want the truth, but it hurts me to see them take on my pain. There are also those encounters where it's a social contract: one asks “how are you?” and the other says “fine”. Culturally accepted, socially safe small talk, for most. If I lie, I create discomfort in myself, if I don’t, I create it for the other person: lose, lose. I have opted to try to contain it for most encounters, but even if my mouth manages a lie, my face or tone doesn’t. Speaking to her own grief, Hollie Starling notes feeling frustrated hearing others’ “lesser” problems and spending those conversations trying to figure out, “..how to make [her] face sit…,” (2023, p. 145). I’m the scared rabbit painted on the wood disc failing to keep my grief from touching others. This piece is a way for me to be honest and seen without needing to find the truest, safest words.

“Othering” of the Griever and Performing Grief: Societal Expectation/Comfort vs Personal Experience/Need

Grief and death are uncomfortable subjects within western society. A self fulfilling prophecy, we increase our discomfort by avoiding the subjects. This avoidance may be intended as kindness on the part of one interacting with the bereaved. Not knowing what to say or how to help, we avoid each other’s grief so as to do no harm. The unfortunate result is, however, harm. When we don’t normalise the whole of the grief experience, we “other” and pathologize the griever. When at their most vulnerable, the bereaved have to learn a new set of social rules to function in the world and are likely questioning their own identity at the same time. This creates doubt and anxiety causing the griever to pathologize themselves, helped along by societal expectations and  our own internal shame structures.

“There is no one way to grieve, and yet we have been socialized to feel that we must grieve in specific ways or risk becoming pathological or abnormal,” (Ord, 2009). When we behave or outside of the societal bounds, society becomes uncomfortable; concern for the existing social contracts bubbling up as grievers go off script. Slowing progress is the worst sin: businesses want employees back and producing as soon as possible. Three or five days of bereavement and you should be able to jump right back into the machine; if not, you could lose your job and the ability to provide for your basic survival: monetary and social punishment. Having grown in western society, I have a tendency to  play into the societal narrative and begin to “other” myself, “...we are engaging in performativity, and grieving the way in which we have been socialized,” (Ord, 2009). As “acceptable” grieving methods fail me and I try to shift or change the natural cycles of grief to fit the prescribed mould, I become more disconnected from society and myself.

My art practice has been a vehicle for my own deprogramming as I search for a way to grieve honestly and unashamedly: “... actively engaging in resistive performance is a way in which the body can resist,” (Ord, 2009). The arts community is already a place of pushing boundaries, so, while I am engaging within another societal system, this one has a larger appetite for self expression. My resistive performance is an open expression of my grief, often using dark or occult leaning imagery and symbolism: things that general western society considers taboo. Through my practice, I have had the growing sense that the real taboo in my work is honesty. While more welcomed in the arts community, truth rarely wins over comfort in western society. Framing my practice as resistive to that comfort culture, I am seeking to disrupt, causing and sharing discomfort. “Ultimately, I am breaking the normative, disciplined performance of grief and performing differently and freely. I am creating an alternative discourse through which to grieve and experience loss; I am also reframing it as resistance,” (Ord, 2009).

Art Process as Ritual

I used to think I was bad at ritual. I struggle to settle and meditate or commit and form a habit, but my definition of ritual has been too limited. My creative process has evolved into a pure act of ritual. I create to exorcise my trauma. If I lose the thread of the feeling a work is based in, I can’t continue that work, so I have tools, such as music and poetry, to pick it up again.  If I continue without that connection, the work feels empty. That thread hooks into my center, the vulnerable core of all my thoughts and feelings, and allows the work to drink them up. It’s a spell, a ritual, a sacrifice, a cleansing. 

Words and music are intrinsically linked to my process. I write a poem somewhere between sketching and beginning the actual artwork; writing is my version of meditation. The poem is edited throughout the making, but it serves the purpose of an emotional anchor for the piece. If I feel disconnected, I revisit the poem. I also make a playlist for every piece and listen to that playlist whenever I am working on the piece. Where the poem reconnects the thread, the playlist maintains it, helping to keep it connected and constant. The preparation of these elements are like laying out feather, string, rowan, and bell for some ancient rite. They are tools that help me stay on the same plane and in the same emotional space as the work.

There is certainly something to the weight of each ingredient of a ritual: together they make a whole, but also exist as a singular component on their own. I feel more vulnerable about sharing my poetry, a piece of my sacred ritual, than sharing the visual artefact. Both are very personal, but there is a difference in the intimacy and directness of the communication: when read, the poetry is my words while the words for the visual artwork come from the viewer. I may never hear them and they may never hear mine, in regards to the work. Our words for the work will hopefully overlap at times, as I am trying to coax certain thoughts and connections from the viewer, but conjuring words in one’s head is a different experience than reading the words another has written. Initially, poetry was purely a tool to transport me to the place the work was growing from, now the words are so intertwined that I need to start incorporating them as part of the final work. I have done this in two ways thus far: the complete poems attached as ritual readings in 8 Day Vigil: 9 years, 37 years, 70 years and phrases from poems as titles for How Monstrous If I Healed and Soft and Savage. The poems displayed in 8 Day Vigil: 9 years, 37 years, 70 years were a bit of an experiment, and I wrote two of them after deciding to incorporate them in the work. Now, I am considering how I can further meld poetry with the visual works, sharing the writings that, at the time of conception, were just for me.

Ord, R. L. (2009). '"It's like a tattoo": rethinking dominant discourses on grief ', Canadian Social Work Review / Revue Canadienne de Service Social, 26(2), pp. 195–211. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41669912

Starling, H. (2023) The bleeding tree: a pathway through grief guided by forests, folk tales and the ritual year. London: Rider, an imprint of Ebury Publishing.