Is there a way of holding in your heart the unknowable - can you love without form, can you love the parts you cannot reach, the darkness which holds everything? The field of undifferentiated night.
Not all storms are large in scale and destruction. Some storms are small, personal, and weathered by a select few. While the world was suffering the onslaught of the covid-19 pandemic, my mother was dying of cancer.
In the wake of her death I returned to the island where I was born, to photograph and spend time in a beloved beach cove - a wilderness that I felt could hold my grief. Over the following months, in an act of creative alchemy that could never achieve its ultimate goal yet served as a rescue mission to the wreckage, I began to rework those photographs into something new.
Grief is a powerful storm largely weathered alone. It is overwhelming and wild, it obscures clear vision and when you are in it, it is often very difficult to see beyond it.
Visual memory, like photography, is written in the language of light. We live in a world that exists largely beyond our capacity to perceive it - perched at the edge of the infinite. When the substance of the world beyond our subjectivity is the unseen, humility is the only recourse. And yet, I wanted to cut things up and start again.
My scissors carved channels, birthing a new vision, an editorial rewrite. Folding time, light flickering over the lip of a wave. My memory from my mother’s illness is full of blanks, not like they were not recorded but like there is a record of something else written over - gaps in the film, editorial omissions, swathes of dark for which I have no answer.
It was like grappling with a beast hovering on the edge of vision this death this other world come to claim you. We lived with it, between worlds with you, holding on to you for as long as we could.
Now I look backwards and I see time advancing across our lives, racing towards oblivion. So much light and beauty it is almost blinding, a heart might shy away from so much love.
The ecosystem in this work is the body beyond our human bodies - the body of the world to which we ultimately belong. Blood running through arterial channels, pools of water holding memories of unknown suns, a depth of continuity incomprehensible to man. This work attends to the interplay of the visible and invisible worlds; to the night blindness of the womb and to the flickering illumination that is at the foundation of both our consciousness and our memories.
Grief is a storm, the weather report is inclement, they say to take shelter. You brace yourself, erect sandbags around your heart, you cannot stem the flood. Grief is not a cleansing, it is a baptism of fire. What will be left after the storm? A great longing for what was.
