Griefwork

Wow, I have so much to say about this work.. I think at first it is going to come out a little disjointed, so bare with me.
I am really grateful to have had this opportunity to do this work in a place like SOVA in Dawson City.
Ultimately, I really desire a dialogue about death. That is what this work is. Me having that dialogue with myself.

Something that comes up for me a lot in this work, is creating a moment, or entering a feeling. To me it’s like time travel.

I need to hear, see, smell, feel that moment, over and over again.

Everyone deals with death and grief differently. For me, I needed to talk about it, express it in as many ways as I could, only then did I really start to heal.

… Can we start teaching kids about grief in elementary school?
EVERYONE YOU LOVE IS GOING TO DIE. That is the fact… so we start small.. thinking about loss in the context of toys.. then the life cycle of animals and the importance of that in nature… then pets.. then family.
Small rant.. but really.. I’d love to hear about people who are creating this curriculum.

Most people in North America don’t entertain the idea of the people they love getting ill until it happens and shatters their whole world… and then when death occurs.. the way we are shown to grieve is a whole other ball game. A quiet, private bereavement and then a quick return to work, is the narrative we are fed. Get back to normal as quick as possible!
NAH!
I took a deep dive into the death positivity movement, and found so much to dig my teeth into, please check out some of these resources:

-A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (book)
-Ask a Mortician (youtube channel)
-Death in the Afternoon (podcast with above mortician)
-The Order of a Good Death
-Unladylike Ep. 31 How to be positively morbid (podcast)

Reach out if you want to chat more about these things.

Zine:
Illness, Death, Resilience, and Art

Cole Pauls, SOVA Alum, and comic artist came back to Dawson for a Residency and visited our English class. He asked us to each make a short comic on the theme of resilience. This was the first piece in my body of Griefwork. I had a few small cries, and then was really proud of the result.

I’m only now realizing I spelt “resilience” wrong on my comic.. hahah

Final 4D Film Fall 2019:
Hurting Healing Human

I feel so fortunate that my family has an abundance of videos of Andrew from his hip hop performances when he was healthy, to professional and cell phone videos while his ALS was progressing.

I have really learned to love working in film. I know I am just scratching the surface with what there is to learn, and that is super exciting.

2D mark making assignment

We had to draw on both sides of translucent paper. I worked mostly with pen in stippling. I was processing what it meant to not be able to visit the physical place where Andrew was buried. I started to feel Andrew with me all the time, so I felt less attached to that place.

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2D Fall Final:
You’re Dying Too

We touched on MANY mediums in first semester of 2D: china ink, embroidery, book binding, different textures in mark making, embossing, life drawing ect. For this piece we had to include at least two mediums. This work came in three pieces.

For the first one I took a piece of paper I had embossed a design on, and used china ink to block out the shapes of my brother Andrew’s face. I used a fine tip pen to create detail, and embroidered the colour in his eye and his smoke.
For the second part I used china ink and thread to depict a distorted hand.
For the third part I used some coloured china ink for the background, and used the tracing paper to trace different elements from an old LIFE magazine from the 70s that had some really amazing art depicting new discoveries in DNA. I’ll admit, the third element was rushed, and appears a little out of place.

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You’re Dying Too is what I titled the piece at the time. I spent a lot of time thinking about how people don’t really think about death until they or someone they love dies, or is dying. And that people look at the dying with pity, but the reality is that we are all dying.. and we should be thinking about it. Not obsessing or allowing the thought to dominate our lives… but preparing for it, as if any other milestone in the lifecycle, and preparing your family for it too.

4D Photography Series:
The Briefest Moment

This series is made up of screen shots from unedited interview footage taken by our friend Pablo Saravanja of Artless Collective. Andrew was in the later stage of his illness, and Pablo was doing a second interview (you can watch the first here: https://youtu.be/H-f7EcY0cUQ) where he had sent Andrew the questions ahead of time, so he could write them out with his communication device. The words that sit over top of the images are quotes from that interview. The series captures a small snap shot of Andrew’s days, as a person with ALS, and how he never ceased to incorporate a dirty joke at any given time.

I hope to access funding to transition my editing skills from Final Cut Pro to Adobe Creative Cloud, and edit and release this never before seen footage.
Someday I will combine all the video content I have collected to tell an even larger story.

3D:
Recompose

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What do you want done with your remains?

Embroidery:
Plan Your Way Out

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For this piece, I sketched the floor plans of Andrew’s house from memory, and stitched over top of it. I would close my eyes, place myself outside Andrew’s house, walk up the front stairs, enter the front door, and walk around the house.

I didn’t quite understand what I was doing or why at the time, but I felt like I needed to do it. Recreate…retrace..rebuild..understand the lay out, and how everything happened.

I wanted people to see the title and think about planning a fire exit, but I also wanted to mark the place that Andrew died, and think about death itself, and how we all need to plan for our own deaths.

The piece is incomplete, it was my first go at embroidery and it took a long time to accomplish what you see. I hope to spend some time finishing the floor plans and thinking about how to visually deliver what I need to feel complete.

Screen Printing

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2D Painting Still Life

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3D Wood Assemblage Final:
Conflagration

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This piece felt like a really important finale to the semester. I dedicated a lot of time, thought, experimentation, and emotional labour into creating this very special display of this collection. The process of working with fire to char the wood felt really important. The somatic experience of working large, with charcoal residue and a drill, and these very precious items moved something through me.

I love that tattered old shirt. It lives in a white bag, sealed at the top, and there are times that I take it out, and I hold the collar to my nose, and I breath it in. It smells like smoke, but past that, is the deodorant that Andrew used to wear. Pressing me face to that piece of cloth brings me to a moment. The one where I would position Andrew’s feet, grab onto his limp wrists, sit back in a squat position and pull him to standing. Then I would reach my arms under his, holding him in a hug, and his head would be perched on my shoulder, and we would pivot together, and I would set him in his wheel chair.
That motion was almost mundane.. it happened 10+ times a day with a different friend or family member taking the lead. But now I look back, and it’s a tender moment. There was so much physical contact.

My last tender memory with Andrew, where it was just us, maybe Myriam too… he asked me to clean his ears. Hahahah… I had never done it for someone else before… and his ear were super full of wax in all the crevases. It took me a couple of q tips per ear, and it was so satisfying to dig it all out. And you know that look you get on your face when you clear your ears out? Well that was the look on his. It was a strange sense of feeling really close and really helpful.
It was nice.