 I’ve been listening to the podcast All There Is with Anderson Cooper about grief. And in a strange way, it’s helped me understand a project, which I recently finished. Cooper points out that grief and sadness link us all—that they are part of the human condition. In fact, nearly everyone has or will experience something that brings profound grief. We might not know about the losses each other is experiencing or feel we should acknowledge them, in part, because as a society we have moved away from rituals that allow us to process grief and loss together.
In 2005, I experienced a series of tragic losses. It was overwhelmingly disorienting. The many dimensions of grief washed over me for years gradually fading in intensity and frequency until those losses became part of who I am on some level. In the mysterious ways that ideas for artworks come to me, I found myself many years later, processing that terrible year, other losses, and wounds and trying to capture a metaphorical “repair” of myself through artistic rituals and performance actions that I recorded on video and with photographs. Dressed in a cloak of mourning in beautiful landscapes, I think I was trying to convey and remind myself that there is sadness but also beauty in the world. In my project, Corazones Cosidos, I use thread made of gold to mend 30 hearts on paper that I pierced with arrows. Part of my impulse for making so many hearts is to show how we all have our constellation of wounds and how in reality they are one of the things that connect us. |