The Things She left Behind
An essay (with pictures!) on how my art practice draws on my grief
This month, I shared how my art practice draws on grief during a Grieving and Weaving event at the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Green-Wood is a beautiful National Historical Landmark, an arboretum with conservation efforts, and includes such permanent residents as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leonard Bernstein, and the inventor of the sewing machine, Elias Howe Jr.; they house an artist in residence, facilitate art installations, death education, and more. Notably, they also run a monthly ‘Grieving and Weaving’ event, and often invite artists to present to their fellow grievers about their art practice.
I presented specifically about the art pieces I’ve made using the objects my late mother left behind–from making paint using flowers from her funeral, to deconstructing one of her sweaters to crochet into hats for my family, and embroidering on her gloves,—hoping to inspire others to incorporate the things their people left behind to process their own grief.
This is the talk as I gave it!
Hi! I’m Alekz, I’m a genderfluid artist, writer, and griever. I’m currently getting my Masters in Fine Art from Parsons in Manhattan, and a major part of my art practice is integrating my grief, found objects, and things that were my mother’s into my work. I’m also a certified grief support specialist interested in becoming a death doula, and I write essays about grief on my substack where I sort of synthesis research about grief into more understandable, prose works (hi! that’s you guys!).
I want to share with you all first some examples of art works I’ve made using objects that used to belong to my mom as a way to incorporate her memory into my everyday life and to embed her vitality into my art–and I’m gonna go through them pretty quickly here but I also have a printed zine with these slideshow images– and then I will share with you all the grief resources I’ve made that I’ll offer for us to explore together in this space.
For a bit of context, my mom died by suicide on January 9th, 2020, and I had to start creating my senior art installation the next month.
I could talk for way too long about all the individual elements of this work–the tapestry which I painted and embroidered invisibly with white thread, the rug I taught myself to make depicting flowers outside her hearse, or the hair and flower petals on the floor that came from my trichotillomania, or the book I made, teaching myself bookbinding, that contained sketchbook pages and poems and journal entries from the day she died until the show went up, but instead I’ll focus us on the windchime. This was also something I taught myself to make on a whim, but every little aspect of the chime is considered, and this is where parts of my mom herself very literally come into the piece.
My mom was a marathon runner, and there’s this group you can join if you run a certain amount of marathons in a certain amount of time, neither of which I know, called Marathon Maniacs. So she was a Marathon Maniac. She ran 25 marathons in something like 5 years, running 4 or 5 in the course of one month. This chime contains some of her race medals, alongside a dried rose of her favorite variety that her sister bought for her birthday 19 days after her suicide. I carved a dala horse, which my mom collected, and hung it there too among these copper pipes I cut down to specific lengths so that when they’re struck, they ring out certain notes that spell her name as my mom was a singer–now her name is Treva and the musical alphabet only goes to G unless you’re Bach, so I asked my dad who is also a musician and a math whiz to do some weird math for me and associate the letters in her name to letters of the scale. And on each of those chimes I etched the music or lyrics of another song that either she loved or reminded me of her. Now I was raised a classical musician so these aren’t ozzy osbourne lyrics but rather the text of Requiem Aeternum, but still.
While I was working on this installation, the COVID pandemic began (and it’s still not over for the record) and I was herded back home from my school in Minnesota to Westchester NY, surrounded by my mom’s things again. I started to draw some of the things she left behind.
Which a couple years later ended up in another form in this painting
Before my mom died, she was in the hospital in an inpatient program for a couple months, and friends and family from all over sent her cards with words of encouragement when she openly shared her struggles. After she died, I bound these cards into a book to keep them all in one place, safe, and as a reminder both to us, the survivors of this loss, and in some way as a reminder to my mom that she was and is so loved, so supported, so seen by so many.
In the back, I glued in one of the envelopes and tucked in all the photos that we brought to her and that she was sent. I just used an old record sleeve for the cover. (I’m happy to talk with anyone about making their own version of this later!)
I learned to make watercolor paint and did hundreds of pans of watercolor from natural pigments like stones and plants and lake pigments and then from expired makeup and I made a pan of watercolor using one of the white roses my dad was gifted when my mom died that he’d kept, dried, since then, even as we had moved at this point, in August of 2020, to North Dakota.
I later used that paint along with others I had made to paint my dad this portrait of him and my mom dancing at a wedding in 2019.
Later, and I don’t have a photo of this, someone commissioned me to make paints for her using her late mother’s makeup, and to paint a Hamsa that her mom had had tattooed on her. That was a total privilege to create and be a part of.
I spent time learning to darn and darning up all the millions of holes in my mom’s moth eaten college sweatshirt so that I could stay in my life (more holes are ever growing on this, and this week I finally moved back to it to mend it more).
That darning knowledge then made its way into my art work as I was graduated by this point and in an artist residency at my alma mater.
This was one of two triptychs all inspired by the Death tarot card about new beginnings, and this one, Death: and ending connected to death: a beginning I painted my mom and her sister, Janelle, who died at three years old, then I cut them out of the canvas, stitched them on to a second canvas, and darned up the hole where they had been cut out (I’m entirely bummed that I was so unconcerned with proper documentation at this time; the texture on the black woven silhouette is wonderful).
Mind you I’m speeding through things and only showing you about a quarter of my art so that you mostly just see works incorporating the things she left behind, so I just have a couple more things to show you.
The next art show I was in with that residency, I embroidered poems I’d written on existing garments, and then made a book that I bound with one of her t-shirts that included all of the poems excerpted in full, and one of those items was these gloves my mom had give to me before she took her life, when I was cold and we were in Minnesota with the actual words we exchanged with the gloves stitched into them.
Finally, I’d like to share how I deconstructed one of her sweaters and use the yarn to instead crochet hats for my family. I realize that taking something they’ve left behind and ‘destroying’ it like this may be terrifying, but I felt it was perfect to take something that was simply sitting in the closet, imbued with her vitality, and turn it instead into something that can be with us very literally and intimately in everyday life.
I’ve also cut her t-shirts into t-shirt yarn! T-shirt yarn has far fewer uses than garment weight yarn, but if you have a practice that involves chunky yarn, it may be perfect for you (I’ve used it in spinning my own chaotic thread to hold up a hanging art piece).
If you have any interest in trying your hand at these or similar processes and need a hand, message me and I’ll help the best I can! I am also open for commissions to complete any of these (ex. makeup paint, flower paint, t-shirt yarn, sweater to hat) projects for you with care and gratitude for your trust.
Finally finally, you can find an ~80 page grief journal I’m working on here at pay what you can, with a suggested donation of $10 as you’re able (very open to feedback on it!).
https://ko-fi.com/s/2e4867a0d9
