STUDIO INSTALLATION MAY 2024

Un-Bound

An installation of work as part of an ongoing project exploring complicated grief. The work is evolving as a response to autobiographical lived experience of traumatic loss through suicide.

Through this project I aim to honour my own journey post loss, to bypass stigma and shame and to enable allowance in others to find creative ways to work through their own experiences.

Un- Bound brings together works focusing on the body as a vessel and a conduit for trapped memory. The physical making of the larger pieces, ‘Now you see me’ and ‘The Keener’, harnesses grief as an energy which can be expelled and relocated as vigorous linear mappings of movement. These gestural works are not only freeing but also give form to hitherto unexplainable emotions.

This can also be explained through ‘Catch’; a performative work filmed on the South Downs where a figure dances freely and with abandon to Catch by the Cure. For this work I constructed a

headpiece from amaranthus stems which totally covers the face. The plant was a favourite of my late husband and is reminiscent of tender, playful times late night dancing together. It honours those moments as a memorial lament of silliness and happiness, so important when processing traumatic loss.

The works ‘I saw the truth undressing’, ‘Corolla’ and ‘memory falls like cream in my bones’ all aim to explore flesh as a substance for storing memory and for protection. In these works I dissect and rebuild the physical self pulling apart and away to see what lies beneath, a mental vivisection attempting to pull out and set free. I envisage these painterly acts as a form of self care.

In the metal trolley piece ‘How to rebuild a life’, the sentiment is the same. Here body parts are piled up and separated ready for analysis before being remade into something new. The soul is a shadow form laid across the bottom shelf open to being reconstructed.

‘Carpe Noctem in five parts’ is a work which evolved as a translation of a lost negative of a place once visited before my husband died. I cut up a much larger work to relocate the pieces as smaller capsules of memory and time. Windows into and onto a fragmented past which can be moved around as wished much like the non linear process of grief itself.