After an irreconcilable loss, you end up doing strange things.
I found myself on hands and knees, making black ink marks on paper. Bones and bonfires, bonfires and bones.
I also got the strong feeling that this was it now, I was going to have to be an artist.
The process of mindlessly making ink lines was a process of survival, some part of me surviving that might otherwise have gone under. I don’t know exactly which part, because it’s still with me. The original bone-fire led to more, and then a year or so later into textured, endlessly layered explorations of single colours, with the grief marks still carved into them. The colours brought back new elements and ways of breathing.
But for this exhibition, coming up on Easter weekend, at Salt Space in Glasgow, I went back to the black ink mark roots, to paper, and the paper led me into the making of a nest, and the nest led me to the spinning of a web, because while the nest was meant to be a pausing place, from which to view the colours above, creation cannot be stopped.
Creation can’t be stopped as destruction can’t be stopped, and so there will always be grief, and the colours, shapes, lines and pressures that make up a life.
Music added itself, voices, cello, a heartbeat, the heartbeat of a stranger, and the chanting that accompanies the newly dead, gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, bodhi svaha!
Flowers came in, and the act of wrapping the inside of a room, rather than the outside of anything.
We’ll see how it turns out. For the moment it’s inside my head, and my living room! If you’re able to come along to Salt Space on Albert road in Govanhill for the opening on Friday 3rd April you’re very welcome, and Grief Marks will be open over the weekend too.
