Where I've Been

Grief art I've made this semester and upcoming grief essays

So, hi! It’s been a minute!

I’m am on the very last leg of my first semester of graduate school (going home tomorrow!) and boyyy has it left me with very little time for much else! It’s been a wonderful gift to be able to spend so much time making art that matters to me, all dealing with grief, and writing a research paper about grief and closure within capitalism. When I finish her up, she’ll be ready for you to read <3

Grief has been central to my semester, even when I was not able to craft something that felt coherent and clear for Befriending Death. I’ve been meditating on the temporality of grief–how time and space and speed, within and without, are affected by grief and vice versa. I’ve been thinking about how the stigmatization of grief and the concept of closure are tools of capitalism, how they are in the best interest of maintaining the empire, and have been writing and re-writing a research paper about that.

Excerpt:

The culturally sanctioned disenfranchisement from one’s state of emotion, one’s earth-shattering grief, and one’s self–pluri-dimensional and social–is much more than simply esoteric ‘feeling rules’ or social expectations. The internalization and disenfranchisement of our individual and collective grief has been carefully conditioned over generations by oppressors–the empire, colonial powers, white supremacy, the government, those in positions of power above us– as a subtle means to maintain power. When it is in the hands of the powerful few to decides who may live and who must die (biopower), they by proxy determine who may be grieved and who may not; who may die good death and who must die a bad death. This stratifies grief and grieving by class, race, and labor power - inevitably benefitting capitalism to continue stigmatizing death, dying, grief, and losses of all types including non-death losses. Grief comes as easily to mankind as breathing, laughing, or crying, as easily as loving (which is the root of grieving; to love is to miss that which leaves) and to stifle it is to stifle a core facet of humanity.

‘Closure’, the made-up phenomenon¹ that we can simply ‘find’ grief’s solution, has stunted our collective understanding of Grief and the ability to grieve. “We are taught to feel shame about grief that lingers,” no matter how traumatic. Sustained grief–crying, shouting, mourning, acknowledging–is not ‘polite grief’, which is understood as limited, personal, and unfolding at home. The capitalistic canon of ‘loss’ would have the employee believe that executions at the hands of police, the dead, the dying, the domestic partner or domestic partners, the funeral, the wake, incarceration, mental health episodes, repeated COVID infections, tending to wounds or a sense of common destiny, are unexceptional. Capitalism’s exploitation emphasizes that there is no clear evidence that these losses can be used in the laboring process and as such will be written out of the room. If “‘the usefulness of a thing’ can best be conceptualized as a ‘use value’”, then the employee on bereavement leave or grieving as needed is not available to stay in the market, to provide products, services, or ‘simple labor’, which is particularly disturbing to the employer.

At the very core of the nation of the United States is a disregard for certain lives and inextricably, certain griefs, which continues to be implicit (and explicit) to this day. There is a profound privilege attached to who gets to grieve and who doesn’t, as well as who gets to be grieved (there is, as we will discuss later, also a profound privilege in not grieving– in forgetting for a moment the precarity of the corporeal body). This biopower manifests, on the most basic levels, in structures like bereavement leave, in concepts such as closure, and in the normalization of violence that works to minimize its (violence’s) impact on the labor force. The work to bring grief back into conversation, of destigmatizing its experience, and of codifying time off–to not just logistically care for the estate of the dead but to honor and remember them–is radical. It is work that is vital to remaining connected to our humanity, and building strong networks within and without us, and is work that must be done through collective action.

The first piece that I made this semester was this painting titled “The Witnesses”, a chaotic painting of fractured and thwarted identity and brash colors and brushstrokes depicting a man and his dog. (Acrylic on Paper, 24”x32”)

[Image ID: painting of a collaged man and his dog in a colorful chaotic abstract space. Both the man and the dog are collaged together from disparate magazine clippings - the man with a head and a half, the face undeveloped and unformed, the torso arms and legs all different, some moving in different directions. The dog is part illustration part large dog and part small dog. The entire background was clearly once fluorescent orange, as it peeks through the rough colorful marks scribbled into half of the background–green and blue and red and so on–an almost blinding, hunting vest orange.]

Background: When my mom died by suicide, she was outside in a wooded park with trails and boulders and a lake (more of a pond, really) and trees. Many trees. When my dad found her, there was a man and his dog passing by, a winter afternoon jaunt to get the blood flowing and the body moving. A practical, healthy routine. My dad called out to the man, frantically asking him if he’d wait in the parking lot for the police for him, that his wife had just died and he couldn’t leave her. And the man waited, and this is all I know.

But I think of him often–who is he? How old was he? My mother was obscured, but what did he see of my father, what does he remember? Does he think of it? What does he look like? How does he describe that day? Did the dog feel there was something wrong? What breed was it? How big? How small? Did it bark a lot? Was it scared? Was he? Did he run to the parking lot, did his heart hammer as he waited? Did he call someone? I don’t know. I don’t know. So I wondered how I could externalize this man and his dog, place them outside of me in order to reach out to them. I collaged this man and this dog from disparate men - from different times and places, moving with different speeds and modes and urgencies, and I painted them into space. A space, a non-space. I’ve painted a memory I don’t have, forming an abstracted, imagined, yet actual person. The painting is strange and clanging and tangled because the subject itself is.

Next I created a quilted triptych banner piece titled “Vanished.” (hand-dyed found fabric, intuitively hand-sewn, dowel, hand-spun thread made with secondhand yarn, scrap thread from the project, t-shirt belonging to the artist’s mother, adhesive)

[Image ID: Photo of a three sequential red banners, imperfectly hand sewn. There is a block of text on the first two which is thwarted by a large hole that cuts through the center. The first banner reads something like “guns must be ke….are a t to themselves and others” and the second reads something like “she performed, pro ted c d v d with a hole in the middle. They’re hung on chaotic hand-spun art yarn on a dowel.]

This piece was an interesting journey, and while I think the outcome fell flat of the intention, I learned a lot about my aspirations with my art by gaining new ways to define what it is not. I hand dyed and hand sewed these second hand fabric pieces intuitively (meaning I didn’t make a pattern or cut the pieces like a puzzle, I simply picked up pieces and fit them together as I went), free handed each of the letters with scissors, then cut a huge hole into the center, thwarting and obfuscating the text. By hanging them one after the other, I created a visual effect of something like a peephole, or a gunshot through paper; something chest high and portal or port-hole like. The hand-spun hanging thread includes fabric from a t-shirt belonging to my mother.

But with this piece, I realized I was making art about not my mom, but the way my mother died–the mode, the method, the facts and objective realities of her moment of her death. And that isn’t what I want to invoke over and over. It’s important, and of course I do believe that otherwise I wouldn’t have made the works in the first place, but it’s not where I want to be building myself a home, you know? Or if it is, I think I realized I at least want to be less overt and illustrate it more metaphorically, let the viewer step into the work with their own baggage.

My final large visual art piece that I’ve created this semester is an installation piece titled ‘Spare Ribs’, a playful found and made object piece about my mom and her two siblings that died by the time she was 9 years old. I wanted to capture and bring into the present a slice of time that had more whimsy and joy for her than perhaps other times in her life. I know I’m projecting a bit and I know I’m using tertiary memory to create, but I think even if the degree of playfulness I invoke is imagined, that it’s no less deserved, you know? I want to honor that she deserved safety and space to play and safe people to play with. I want to acknowledge that the playing she did mattered. The siblings she had mattered, the trees she climbed and the games she played mattered. It mattered that she was safe.

For more photos of the installation, materials descriptions, and the audio description, visit my website here.

[Image ID: a wooden sculpture made of found cabinet door in a base made of found wood. There is a rectangle hole cut off center, inside which there is a painted section of Candyland, a clipped illustration from Peter Pan, there are glow in the dark stars, a mess of pink nail polish, a string of buckles, a string of beads, a sliding lock, a rubiks cube, a lollipop, a care bear]

I had known she had these siblings for most of my life, but I didn’t know much about them–their names, the sort of vague gesture toward the basics of how they died– and for all the work I’ve been making about my mom, I also want to make art honoring and embracing other ancestors, ancestors that impacted my mom. I had a two-hour call with my aunt and asked her so many questions about her late siblings. I had the impetus to ask her about them months ago, but I put off asking her to chat with me because I was worried that she wouldn’t want to talk about her siblings that had died so long ago. However I also thought she might at least appreciate the opportunity to, so eventually I sent her a text asking if she might be open to sharing with me the things she remembers about her siblings Janelle and Jack Brian. She was immediately happy to share “whatever she could remember”. It was a fun and generative facetime call–we laughed a lot, even when we got to the heavier parts. She told me the games they liked to play, and the jokes they used to tell, and the nicknames they used to call each other, and she told me about the days they died, and the days they almost died, and the lives they lived. It was incredibly generous on her part, and gave me so much insight to play with for this art piece.

Janelle was younger than my mom, who was the youngest until she was born and then after her death. She was cute as a button–there are only a handful photos of her I’ve seen, but in just about all of them she’s got a big huge smile. She was born with Downs Syndrome, and as such was prone to pneumonia. She died when she was 3 ½ and my mom was 5. Their brother, the sibling just older than my mom, Treva, was Jack. (His middle name was Brian and his dad’s name was Jack, so they called him Brian until he went to high school and asked to be called Jack. So I had heard him referred to as Jack by my mom and Cindy, my aunt, erred on the side of calling him Brian. So for a nice middle ground I call him Jack Brian in my work.) He was born with a hole in his heart and as such was a bit more sedentary. It was in this sedentariness that Jack Brian and my mom would play Candy Land on the bed, I’m told, and that Jack Brian would talk to truckers on a CB radio where is moniker was ‘Spare Ribs’ “because he’s so skinny!”

The last work I’ll talk about is a grief work I’m hoping to get published! I had an opportunity to do a test drive of these materials at an Open Studio event this past Friday, and I got really strong feedback and will be trying to move forward with an attempt at publication.

{Image ID: a book manuscript with a hand lettered title reading “only death without love is permanent: an opportunity to remember your person by alekz thoms“ and a pile of cards with prompts on a dark wooden surface]

[Image ID: a hand holding a big pile of small cards. The text visible on the top card is “What’s something you’ve learned since they died? A fun fact, a new skill, a family secret, a small town scandal, that thing you guys promised you’d learn one day.“]

I’ve made a resource with a number of ‘questions about your person’ which is to say, questions you may want to be asked about the person or people in your life that you are grieving. “What is their name?” “How do you celebrate them?” “What was their favorite color?” “Who were they to you?” “What have you learned since they died?” and so on. This work is (tentatively) titled ‘Only death without love is permanent: an opportunity to remember your person’. There are two versions of this resource, one is a card ‘game’ that is more social – something you can bring around the table with your family to remember someone together, or something to bring to a memorial or a wake or an anniversary event and so on and so forth. The second is a journal/’workbook’ version that is more individual with the questions and space on a page to answer them. I got such positive feedback on these resources and I am very, very eager to share them more widely.

If you’d like to help me build up these questions (as I know I have blind spots), I’d love if you could tell me what questions you wish people would ask you about your person.

Making spaces for people to reflect on and remember the people that are important to your life is important to me. It’s important that grief is brought into our lives, is brought into the room, into conversation. So often we shy away from it – either because it’s too much to hold or we’re socialized to not ‘burden’ others with our grief. But I hope this resource can ease the feeling of burden with the nature of explicitly asking to hear the hard things, by explicitly offering to hold the memories and the pain in community. Your grief matters, your person matters.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to this work:

hooks also writes that the culture of death and dying and grief in the West is a culture that “would deny us the emotional alchemy of grief”. So often, we are expected to grieve quickly and quietly. We are expected not to dwell on the people in our lives who have died, we are expected not to bring them up in casual conversation. We live in a culture that has demonized death to the point where any mention of it is uncouth, out of line, taboo. I want to challenge this. I want to open up a space to safely subvert the social expectations of death conversations. “We are taught to feel shame about grief that lingers. Like a stain on our clothes, it marks us as flawed, imperfect.” But the grief never really leaves us, does it?

I want you to grieve for as long as it takes. I want you to grieve as loudly as you need to. I want to hear you laugh while you tell a story about your person, or to cry while you talk about the things that were really, really hard to experience. Because those experiences, those moments, those people all shaped you and continue to shape you, even when they are gone. And to deny that is, I feel, a great robbery. bell hooks goes on to tell us that, essentially, only death without love is permanent. By talking about and remembering the loved ones we’ve lost, they live on. Grief is love. It is the love that reverberates after the bell has stopped swinging.

All the writers say it, that “the possibility of pain is where love stems from.” (Matt Haig, ‘The Humans’) that “this is all of the unexpressed love, the grief that will remain with us” (Andrew Garfield). That “to be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.” (bell hooks) Honoring and speaking on the grief you feel is an expression of love. It is to say, ’I love you so much that even in a world without you, you are here. You left a mark on me, you shaped me, and I can never forget that. I don’t want to forget that.’

Writing down, or thinking back on, or painting out even the smallest, most inconsequential moments in life or death may mean nothing, but sometimes those moments of nothing can fill an entire room, like silence. Unseen but tangible, pressing into the nooks and crannies of every space, ringing in your ears.

I will hopefully be updating here much more frequently as the semester is closing, and I know I will have an essay for you soon (that first excerpt if you can remember that far back in the post) and maybe I’ll share a bit about the temporality of grief, something I’ve been thinking a lot about this semester but don’t yet have all the language I want to be able to speak on it.

I’ll ease myself back into posting, and please feel free to request certain topics for me to cover at any point! I’m very open to writing what you want to see.

Love, Alekz