Briana McCarthy

January 14, 2024 - Fiji Finger Cutting

“Others make remembrance a permanent alteration. In Fiji prior to the twentieth century the scars of mourning were permanent. In James Frazer’s The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead (1913) the anthropologist records the customs of ritual circumcision and fingers being cut off in remembrance. Frazer notes one case ‘after the death of a king of Fiji [in which] sixty fingers were amputated and being each inserted in a slit read were stuck along the eaves of the king's house.’ In a lecture on the topic he recalls some elderly members of the community had only a thumb remaining” (Starling, 2023, pp. 136-137).

This is striking to me. Maybe, in part, because as open as I am to one’s right to physically alter their own body, the idea of crippling one’s self for the dead is so far outside of my cultural base. In western culture, tattoos hold stigma, even in 2023, and the alteration of tattooing is quite benign compared to the removal of a finger. 

My initial reaction to this information was anger, which is definitely born of my cultural, national experience. The idea of maiming one’s body to remember a dead leader or king sets all my injustice alarms off. People in positions of power are scum and the only finger they deserve is the middle one, firmly attached to the hand that can deliver a firm knuckle sandwich! I then acknowledged that I know next to nothing about the power dynamic within the Fiji culture. My reaction is based purely on my white, christian, USA upbringing. It is the perfect storm of ‘blind belief’, ‘we are all equal but you’re a woman so you aren’t as equal, but remember that we are all equal’, and ‘Jesus and God are white men’. I have been lied to by adults my whole life. When I realized it, that was it for any blind trust and authority became an enemy.

Calming the fire, I’ve been thinking about what grief feels like and the idea of physically representing that on one’s body. It is already common practice to keep mementos after a loss. The family gathers and sorts through belongings, dividing them up to keep, sell, or donate: it becomes a search for meaning and memento. If body altering takes place in western culture it is usually in the form of a memorial tattoo: a memento that can’t be lost and something that a stranger may strike up a conversion about enabling a kind of spontaneous remembrance. The act of removing fingers, physically hindering yourself in a way that mirrors the emotional trauma, is interesting but seems incredibly unhelpful in the continuation of life. It was hard enough for me to carry on with functioning, and some days I simply don’t, after my mother’s death, the idea of also having a self-inflicted physical issue to overcome and adjust to seems beyond daunting. Is there something in seeing the physical manifestation of loss that bolsters the spirit or that causes the loss to feel more important therefore more bearable? Missing a limb or something vital without the ability to regain it is a very good metaphor for grief: having a portion of one’s self removed and then buried apart. Maybe there is something in giving a piece of yourself to the dead so you’ll always be together and connected in some way.

In the piece(s) I’m working on in reaction to this, the amputee keeps the fingers. I was thinking about keepsakes of remembrance, mourning clothes that alert society to one’s loss, and trying to hold onto identity after a loss. There is also power in actions of choice: I chose to remove these fingers, it didn’t just happen to me. We can’t control loss and what is ripped out and mangled by it, but coping is an attempt, a necessary attempt, to regain control and feel safe again. There is also a sense of calm in the violence: 

• Multiple fingers: this person has lost before and understands grief better at this stage
• Each finger can represent a person and become a source of remembrance: we aren’t together as we were, but we are still together in this way
• It’s a message to society: see what I have endured, and yet I still stand before you. See my strength?

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

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January 21, 2024 - Infestation

There are stretches of time while grieving that I have been unable to talk about or process anything else. A coworker or friend would be talking about their child starting school or the hike they went on and all I had  for them were the very basic responses that were purely for show; I felt no emotional connection to the words outside of the desperation not to be found out. I needed to be asked how I was, to have an outlet, but I dreaded the question. I couldn’t lie, I've never been able to do so very convincingly, and it felt dishonorable to my mother.  I couldn’t stand their reaction as the joy or wellness drained from their face. I felt like I had been ruthless in my truth and killed their happiness with the sorrow I couldn’t pull myself from. It felt like I had infected them with my pathological sadness and I became afraid of doing so and felt guilty and selfish.

I’ve been thinking about trees and woodworm. Trees play a large role in folklore and early religion. There is the world tree, Yggdrasil, and trees signify the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Woodworm infests and multiplies in wood, easily spreading. 

Hares: prey animals, symbolic of resurrection and rebirth

Hare color: unnatural colors to continue the theme of feeling ‘othered’ or pathologized for feelings

Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (no date) Yew. Available at: https://www.kew.org/plants/yew (Accessed: 10 November 2023).

Cocker, M. (2023) Country diary: these remarkable carvings are, at least, beautiful in miniature. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/05/country-diary-these-remarkable-carvings-are-at-least-beautiful-in-miniature (Accessed: 12 December 2023).

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January 28, 2024 - Societal vs Personal Grief: Reflection on Unit 1 Work

My work is a reaction to and rejection on western societally accepted grief practices and those deemed inappropriate for the public purview. A lot of it represents the actual feelings of grief, but also the anxiety associated with grieving within a society that “others” or pathologizes the griever.

I haven’t shown a blatant comparison to societal practice vs personal experience. I feel like that is a natural comparison. That said, I wonder if the initial nudge in the direction of grief, death, and mourning is strong enough in my work. The ritual and occult practices are well evident, but I may need to borrow from some more accessible imagery (death as a cloaked figure, ravens, skeletons/skulls, a scythe, black dogs - like cerberus). Much of the art I have looked at is very blatantly showing wailing, sad people covering their faces; death as a winged, dark figure or skeleton; piles of rotting fruit or objects with a skull; some landscapes such as Oak Fractured by Lightning by Maxim Vorobiev or Isle of the Dead by Arnold Brocklin. The landscapes and still lives actually seem more personal to the artists than the other imagery, which is much focused on showing a death scene or the scene before an imminent death.

I’m looking for less obvious symbolism, maybe disguising grief as the bereaved must do to carry on in society. My work is more about the feelings and journey of the griever than death itself.

Works I've been looking at...

Most of the works I've been looking at are from the 1800s. In terms of choosing the works, this was coincidental. I just like these and I have an interest in the use of landscape or still life used to explore death and grief. Having already explored landscape as metaphor in 8 Day Vigil: 9 years, 37 years, 70 years,  I am interested in pushing this further, but not quite yet and probably not within this course.

I am also interested in the evolution of, or staying power, of symbolism in art and often find that early archetype is simpler to sort through. Is that a good or bad thing? I don't think it is either, but I do want to find that balance of symbolism in my own work of well known symbols and personal symbolism.

February 18, 2024 - Unit 1 Assessment: Answering Questions

A key point is to identify what the “accepted” practices and/or narratives of grief in Western society are – given how central this idea is (as something you are working against).

The central aspect I am working against is industry/business over personal wellbeing. The funeral industry itself walks a precarious line in regards to morality and ethics. 

Even the kindest of funeral directors is trying to make a sale and the prices involved are exceedingly greedy. Funeral directors don’t provide all your options, but present those that will benefit their bottom line: lying by omission. If one can’t afford even those, the griever must ask about finding less costly alternatives, forcing an extra struggle and conjuring shame in the vulnerable griever. When my Mother passed, we selected a modest package, mainly because our family has never gone for anything too ostentatious. We went with cremation and a plain wooden box as an urn, with a simple engraving: The funeral was still over $3,000.

There is also the question of morality for non-funerary businesses in regards to their bereavement policies. The amount of days granted, often without pay, is generally 3-5, if you are related to the deceased. The amount of time allowed is dependent on how close of a relation you are to the dead and actual attachment and relationship hold no bearing. As capitalism has taken hold, humanity has diminished and the act of grieving has been villainized. There was a time in England when grieving was expected to last 2 years (Starling, 2023), a far cry from current expectations. This societal shift also changed the personal grief experience, causing grievers to have unreachable expectations for their own journey and feelings of shame and confusion as a result which compound their grief.

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.

It would also be great to hear you expand on your use of symbolism—a personal symbolic, or drawn from particular cultural contexts?

My symbolic language is certainly influenced by mythology and folklore, but is mostly of a personal nature.

• Trees - throughout history they are used as symbols of life, death, and rebirth. Forests are both welcoming and healing, but also represent danger and the unknown. Many a hero has made a journey through the forest as their trial. The forest not being good or evil, but a force with a balance of both meant to test the protagonist.
• Wolves - like the forest, a creature of moral neutrality. Often the villain in stories, it is also taken as a totem or symbol of bravery and wisdom by the hero. I often use the wolf as a metaphor for grief itself. Grief isn’t the enemy, it is a natural force. It can cause great harm, but it is not vindictive. Grief stalks the edges of your existence and then pounces, often catching you unaware.
• Rabbits/Hares - prey animal: anxious, ever alert, hunted by most things
• Fungi - still a source of mystery and key to decomposition and rebirth (the breaking down of plant and animal matter, creating rich soil that grows more). Transformation and life from death. Like death, we have struggled to understand fungi and there is a taboo element (psychedelics, occult…).  Like grief, there is the above ground, visible experience that society allows or expects, then there is the underground, which connects us all: shared experiences that occur individually.
• Fingers/Missing appendages - Grief has caused physical and mental changes within me. It feels like losing a limb: suddenly you can’t function as you did and there is no getting back what is gone. I zeroed in on fingers after reading about a culture in Fiji where the villagers chop off one of their own fingers when a village leader dies (Starling, 2023, pp. 136-137). Fingers as the symbol for a loss of a person felt appropriate for many reasons: we see our own hands and fingers everyday. They are right in front of us and we probably examine them more than any other part of our body. The loss of fingers isn’t completely crippling but greatly affects our day to day and we lose more function as more disappear. Also, where function remains, it may be a different kind of function: learning to use the non-dominant hand or contorting the fingers in a new way. 

Can you expand more on the role of writing in your work? (This is very hastily touched on in the final line). Do you think about writing as another form of ritual, or as a space for more distanced reflection?

Writing is both a place for ritual and for distanced reflection. Writing about a work or idea helps me gather my thoughts, helps me plan (if I’ve written it, I am more likely to remember it). Writing keeps my thoughts organized and tethered.

As ritual, free form writing and poetry lend to my understanding of myself and my subject. The free form idea/feeling/thought dump is cleansing. It’s the release of having said and expressed the things I need to without having cemented them as part of me, in the way that speaking them to another person weaves them into your identity: a purge. Poetry works a little differently. It’s a refining of the purge and a gathering of the truest pieces, the bits that are defining of my identity. Working through a poem to find the truest phrasing to describe what I feel and understand, so it may also be understood by others, is the ritual. Writing poetry as part of the planning and sketching phase of creating work helps me anchor the feeling I wish to be present in the visual artwork. It also provided something I can revisit and use to anchor myself during the process of creating the work. This, also harkens to ritual as a way to usher me into the creative and emotional space I need to be in to convey what I wish to in the work.

Does grief always put us on the “outside”? Can you define what this means to you—as distinct from more socially permitted expressions of grief, as well as more formalized modes of ritual practice, perhaps?

I think we, and others, perceive ourselves as being on the outside during grief. Some people recognize the specific place the griever is in, others are bewildered by it. In sharing the grief, there are often reactions based in discomfort, which helps isolate the griever. This, I think, stems from how little we discuss grief and death until we experience it first hand, then it is a scramble to say, do, feel the “correct” thing in the moment: it’s all improv. There is also a personal search for a way to feel better.

Being on the “outside” means one is considered ill, or broken, or wrong for feeling or expressing their feelings the way they do. It’s the sense that there is a right way to grieve, which seems to be “get therapy, keep it to yourself, and act like everything is okay when in public or at work”.

There are certainly places/situations that require grief to be expressed in specific ways: you wouldn’t disrupt a work meeting…but there should be allowances for you to leave if necessary. Most jobs in the US allow for 3-5 days bereavement. The idea that someone would be “suitable for public” 5 days after losing someone they care for is crazy. I hadn’t even started to fully process my Mom’s death after 5 days. I was still randomly bursting into tears. The idea of going back to work, mingling with coworkers and clients, was terrifying and made all my “symptoms” ratchet up. I remember working on advertising data reports with tears streaming down my face and straining to empty myself of all emotion, to think of nothing, so my eyes wouldn’t be red and puffy for client meetings. What broke me was being handed 2 emergency client accounts within 2 weeks of returning to work - angry clients at their wits end. I spent hours being chewed out for something I couldn’t control and after the loss of my Mother had already made mince of me. Being human is the greatest sin an employee can commit.

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February 25, 2024 - Repetition and Time Heavy Processes

Repetitive and time intensive processes are key elements of my practice. I’m trying to pinpoint when this began, but there isn’t a single “ah ha!” moment: repetition and always had a foundational place in my life. From childhood, I would repeat and practice until I was satisfied: homework, video games, a recipe, soccer. I would push beyond my known limits, forgetting to eat, realizing I could barely walk myself to the car after soccer practice, the exhaustion seemingly hitting all at once when I allowed it. There was a drive to “get it right”. Coming from an internal, personal drive, not greatly affected by outside judgment, this obsessive, slamming myself against the wall until I broke through, though not entirely healthy or balanced, allowed me to find that meditative sweet spot in repetition, “impossible tasks”, and time consuming processes, like a runner’s high.  

The meditative space formed from the repetitive making I practice has also informed my material knowledge as I handle different materials for many hours at a time. There is something very important about physically handling materials, like there is some imbuement or swapping of spirit. I don’t connect with work that seems too manufactured, when the artist crafted the design and the work was fabricated elsewhere. When I learn that about a piece, I can still appreciate the physical qualities but the soul drains out of it: it feels empty. 

I believe that seeing labor intensive elements within an artwork takes viewers to that space as well. The evidence of time spent contributes an additional layer of meaning and weight to the work. It alludes to ritual, care, devotion, and obsession.

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