The close-up of the four photographs is really to focus on the bottom right -- I've been creating these for about four years now, and the method still leaves me pleasantly surprised.
It's been awhile, no? It's just been more of the same through June and July, which is why I haven't really updated with any studio shots. I combined :spectre with the rest of the instant series last month and have been slowly building it into an installation. Looks a bit like a glitch, I think. Once poised on Laing's wall and allowed to breathe, I think there'll be little doubt what it's representative of. Anyway, since I finally made it over to the second wall, I thought now would be a good time as any to update my journal. The close-up of the four photographs is really to focus on the bottom right -- I've been creating these for about four years now, and the method still leaves me pleasantly surprised. I’ve stopped transferring the developer to tissue and started using it with hot-press watercolour to make prints. They don’t really translate well to digital media, so I have no examples as of yet. But perhaps when they’re framed they’ll be a bit more photogenic. In the meanwhile, they’ll sit patiently in the background.
In 1951 John Cage stepped into Harvard’s anechoic chamber expecting to experience silence. What he heard instead was the sound of his body, the high pitched hum of his nervous system and the low bass of his blood circulation. I will never tire of telling this story.
This exhibition will navigate loss, death, and grief through photographic practice; using damaged and broken equipment as the language of mourning. Through destruction as a narrative, the exhibition will draw out and identify the seemingly endless melancholia of arrested grief, corrupted sense of self, disengaged memory sequences, and unfocussed wandering.
Cheerful reading before bedtime.
I've been critical of Kübler-Ross's grief stages mostly because it's been detrimental to my recovery from the loss of my parents. I didn't really pay much attention to the stages personally, but those around me expected me to follow this strict guide of when and how to feel. I know this is a gross misapplication of the grief model, but the misapplication is societal. In both deaths, when I wasn't following the prescripted stages I was questioned and bullied over it. What this ended up causing was for me to retreat further within, thinking I was experiencing death the wrong way. Eventually I just shut it out entirely and it festered like an infected wound for years while I consciously tried to bury it deeper. My whole issue comes from the way grief models are presented. They're usually listed, and even with warnings ("please don't use this as a list!"), we still do. Perhaps if the model was some sort of visual graphic it could better represent the seemingly universal moods that we can all connect with. I don't doubt there isn't a fair set of emotions we all may feel, but we all experience bereavement so radically differently I fear even suggesting, say "anger" (one I haven't personally encountered) as an emotion present in grief will present a problem for people who haven't felt it. Lauren J. Breen and Moira O’Connor[1] note the fundamental structure of grief through psychology analysis also fails to consider grief doesn’t always align to specific functions. They posit that this creates a paradox for complicated grief: a cyclic interference in what may actually be healthy grieving following a delineated path. By medicalising grief, and assigning a diagnostic category, we create a self-fulfilling prophesy of damaged individuals. This does not, in fact, prove that complicated grief isn’t a thing, rather, it proves its existence by default. Until a society can understand death, we will not have the correct capacity to deal with it. [1] Breen, L. J. & O’Connor, M. (2007) “The fundamental paradox in the grief literature: a critical reflection.” Omega: journal of death and dying. 55 (3) 199-218. |
RESEARCH & STUDIO DIARYHere you will find essays, texts, experiments, and information about my research and studio development. ARCHIVES
February 2019
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