Making Grief.

Usually it is a physical process that makes my abstract work. Love-making, rolling, burning, burying, dancing have all played parts in past works. Having had several deaths close to me in the last few weeks i was thinking a lot about the process's around grief, how we cope or not, we all have a unique way. I decided to make this personal piece on the theme of grief, using grief itself as an art making process. I used an existing experimental piece with the turquoise stains of plant food still visible o the canvas. It seemed right to use a canvas that was not shiny and new but had an existing story to tell already embedded in it, such is death.  Clearing out my grandmothers house my family found lots of cards and letters i had written her over the years which they had saved for me but it seemed strange to be in ownership of a letter you had written to someone else, i have letters she had written to me. I decided to burn these cards that i had sent her on a fire in the garden and use the remaining ash and charcoal as a pigment. It had a raw, crumbling deep black quality to it. Essentially carbon, the building block of all life on earth. The only other material i used was scarlet ink that i had been given on a trip to the paint laboratory in London...its blood like movement and hue seemed fitting, life, death. The process this time was simple, i lay the canvas in front of my shrine and wept for the missing characters in my life, remembering, missing, thanking them whilst instinctively applying the pigment and ink with my bare hands. It was not a process i fully documented on this occasion as it was a very personal moment and don't want people to be overwhelmed by my own grief when they look at the work and how it was made, but to make a painting that is relatible to all individuals grief without pushing my own narrative. I have no desire to make work that is art therapy, an uncomfortable personal regurgitation.....just the finished work and the title is enough to get the point.