A deeper insight into my grief work project ..
..including the tradition of Keening, Martha Graham's dance 'Lamentation', the brilliance of Florence Peake and letters to M.
Hurst street, Oxford 1993.
Those subscribers who follow my Visual grief diary on instagram know that I often write posts in the form of a letter to Mike. It enables me to establish a deeper connection with my purpose as M and I corresponded via letter for 2 years when he was at University in Oxford and I was living in Leeds. In the days before email those letters were my life, I almost didn’t exist around them.. We perhaps sent 2 or 3 a week each and often they were scented, filled with flea shop finds, bus ticket and hairs ( each others found on pillows). Sometimes there were feathers from walks, mine were always sealed with lipstick and his with wax. We were without limits and constraints and deeply romantic both in our relationship and views of the world. It was a bubble existence and I will always remember those early years as near perfect. We read T S Eliot, took photo booth selfies and spoke in Smiths song lyrics. Photo above of us as young daft idiots…
image of some of the letters
M was 17 when we first met and I had just turned 22 but the age gap meant nothing. There was an element of disquiet and darkness to him which I never questioned as I was the same and he saw that in me too. Mine is deeply epigenetic and his I’ll never know. All I know is that his slowly grew until it consumed him and there was nothing I or anyone else could do. Of course it’s not as simple or black and white as that but the seeds were there from those very early days even in our bubble world.
Making this project I can’t help but touch on his darkness as well as my own. Each time I make a drawing, painting or prose it’s there asking to be acknowledged, waiting to be worked through. I can never speak for him but I feel his voice very strongly urging me to take risks, break boundaries and to be honest. This gives me a freedom alongside the freedom of making the work without the focus of sales or a gallery agenda..(although those may well happen at some point). I entered into this new phase of work with all this in my head; my purpose, his voice and a need to use this freedom in the best way possible.
My gallery takeover week was a chance to work free and large ! I love working large not because I want to be seen or noticed but because it’s so physical. Each mark comes from my whole body; an expellation, an exorcism of sorts. I’ve flung around the phrase ‘embodied work’ a lot this week and kind of pissed myself off with it ! But I can’t think of a better way of describing work that starts in the cells and veins and nerve endings and exits through movement at the end of my brush.
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