Death and drawing

The body of work that I created at the end of my degree was a response to the loss of my house, through unexpected eviction.  Moving 70 miles from the town in which I grew up created a profound sentimentality of displacement.  At no point did I become ‘house-less’ but rather experienced ‘homelessness’.  I was interested in exploring the feeling of being ‘outside’, even when inside, and of not being able to gain access to a place be it in memories, psychological or physical spaces. I explored our phenomenological and temporal relationships we have with our being, our space and our place.

The works below showcase this body of work:

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During the time this all happened my mum died so this added to the sense of physcological homelessness and displacement.  I created the piece shown below which was heavily influenced by this event.

This piece I named Grief and was firstly thinking about how my mother never liked being bought flowers as they just died.  This led onto the symbolism of flowers and their uses - births, weddings, gifts but also bleak moments in life - illnesses, deaths, places of death and burials.  They remind us of life and death so how can I encapsulate that?  

Initial viewing looks like a nice, twee picture but then the work demands more thought and inspection and one's awareness of their fate is heightened when they see them in the conditions they are in.  The flowers cannot receive air or water, they will die.  They are going to die anyway.  Which led back to what happened with my mum, she was only 55 when she died, I think now I should have been older than that when she died.  We feel cheated as if we have this allotted long period on which to live our lives.  Therefore, I truly believe that our lives will be better led knowing this, not obsessing, but valuing our time and doing all that we can, what we can and when we can.

So what I wanted to do now was to expand on Grief, make a body of work that fits with it.  It initially went with the works mentioned earlier but was not cohesive.

The experimental pieces I have started are basic works in progress.  I am waiting on more materials to improve on the pieces below.

What I am also excited about is I am drawing again!  

As they say, watch this space and see how this all develops.  I would also really value any comments you might have.

Bye for now :)