I’ve written and created a lot around grief - I always have. Sometimes I feel my gifts are grief: I carry the stories of my family, of the people who have passed, and I create vigils of art around their memories.
My first significant experience with loss was when I was 11 and my mom’s best friend passed away. She had been my babysitter growing up, I spent many, many days at her house, bugging her cat, having stand offs with her around finishing all the food on my plate (even when it was tuna with onions in it), and so many sun-filled days at the beach with her when our families would vacation together. I feel so lucky that decades later I can still remember her so clearly, so well - clear enough to hear her voice. I am almost the age now that she was when she passed. It’s a long time for the world to be without her. I wrote her a poem when I was 11, my tears staining the face of the doll she’d sewn me years ago - art was the way that I processed the enormity of something so big and so impossible. That pull to create art has been a gift.
Since then, I have experienced a significant amount of loss, and every single one is so different. Every one is sacredly held in the halls of my memory. Grief, like healing, is not linear. It ebbs and flows like rivers that flood and recede through the seasons. In my experience, in time, it gets easier: but the space that person left behind will always remain.
This project, “GRIEF HOUSES” is about that space. It’s about creating a portrait of the person who has passed by what they left behind. It aligns quite a bit to ideas I first explored in my thesis, an autoethnography about personal objects left behind and different losses: losses through death, and losses through dementia. It’s also a project that’s moving at it’s own pace: I imagine I’ll be creating and working with this theme over the next year and I’m being flexible both to the stories submitted and honouring my own energy as I unfold it.
If you’d like to participate in this project, I would so love to hear from you. You can submit through the Grief Houses submission form found here. I am especially looking for houses/spaces before they are packed up and sorted through, and while I would love to document a whole house, I’m also open to apartments, rooms (even in hospice), etc. All participants will need to sign a release to be a part of the project. If you’re unsure, please reach out anyways and we can see what’s possible.
If you want to support community projects like this, you can join my Patreon. Funds raised through Patreon go into projects like this and allow me to continue creating and keep participation barriers as flexible and open as possible.
One of my favourite photos: my grandparent’s sunlit living room after my Nan died, Aunt Dorothy sitting in Nan’s chair and my grandpa gently letting us all know we could leave anytime.
It’s a photo that’s full of grief, shifting rituals, a portrait of someone made up of their absence and what they’ve left behind.
I’ve been (slowly, so slowly) developing a project around houses & grief, and I’ve thought of this photo a lot as I do.
