Honouring ghosts & the nature of grief : artmaking as transfiguration

Summary: This thesis project is rooted in relationships─ the deep bonds which we share with one another, with our more-than-human kin, and our relationship with the abundant animate life that exists in the natural world. After losing several loved ones to cancer in a short time I became drawn to the interplay of grief and wounded ecology. This led to a methodological framework for making which involves thinking with grief and thinking with and through nature. Through curious and embodied engagement with the natural world, my aim is to create a material vernacular for grief using the formal and metaphoric language of nature. The questions I am researching through my thesis work are: How is the transformational nature of grief enacted through the intuitive, embodied, material, and metaphoric processes of making? How can the absence created by death be materially and conceptually made present through space and form? The research takes a phenomenological approach through walking, observing, sensing, and collecting organic ephemera in the natural environment. This sensorial experience includes an openness to the spectral─ making space to listen and commune with ghosts while in nature and in the studio. My embodied experiences in the natural world and the organic matter I’ve collected are then translated through various material investigations in the studio including relief printing, repetitive layering to build up forms, generating 3D sculptures, and finally, creating large scale immersive installations. This thesis has elucidated how death can be a type of refugia in both life and artmaking ─ allowing us to draw from the compost of loss and chaos to re-order and reanimate them through altered forms. The final artworks have been propelled by asking: What material processes enact regeneration─ extracting a quality from the debris of our losses to make new with? The thesis project explores what it looks like to actively grieve, to go on living with death. It enacts the hopeful potentiality in the simultaneous work of mourning while making new.