Study Statement
Year One - Study Statement | 2024 v.1
Working title
‘Trace Narratives: Belonging and Loss in the Landscape’
Trace: ‘a mark, object, or other indication of the existence or passing of something’
Narrative: ‘an account of connected events; a story’
My field of study is therefore the story of the existence and passing of my own grief and the grief of us all, collectively. The subject of personal grief began with the sudden loss of my mother when I was five. Normality for me has always included formidable, sometimes overwhelming grief and a pervading sense of no-longer-there-edness. I have struggled all my life to express, define or work through this feeling, which I have only come close to achieving this when I am in places to which I feel strong connection, such as the ancient landscapes of Wiltshire, where I now live or previously the outlying islands of Hong Kong where I grew up. These places have a quality of belonging or connectedness to them, although they may not be geographically related, except through me. There is an interplay in the there-edness of place that gives a voice to the no-longer-there-edness that we call grief. The associated events and places where these feelings have a voice have become my story.
Questions I am asking myself
What is this feeling of grief or not-there-edness and what does it mean to me? How do I give a voice to this feeling of simultaneous belonging and loss? Why is a sense of place so central to working through these feelings? Can grief truly be expressed or can it only be lived?
How do I understand the landscapes to which I feel such connection?
How do I ‘take hold’ of these traces and record them? How do I create a physical record of myself and place at once? Which are the traces that are most important to me?
How does this ancient place where I live feel to me in the context of climate catastrophe? How does the grief of my past intersect with the anticipatory grief of what is to come?
How do I express anticipatory grief? How do I connect it to the grief of my past and present? If my own sense of belonging is connected to places, how will my own connection fare as these places face a mass extinction and ecological breakdown?
How do I make work that connects my own grief with a wider, collective sense of loss? What are the rituals that allow connection through grief and place? Is there hope in the fact of planetary ruination? Does kindness offer us a possible strategy? Is kindness an act of resistance? Is my art an act of kindness?
2. Aims and Objectives
Aims
I aim to create traces of myself and my own sense of grief. I aim to create a body of work in a language of mark making that records and memorialises my experience of belonging and loss. I aim to confront the sense of no-longer-there-edness by re/creating a process of ruination, elimination, erasure, deletion, extinction, expiry, departure and loss.
I aim to better understand the physicality and meta-physicality of the landscapes of my past and present and the channels through which these landscapes offer me remembrance and connection. I would like to imagine the landscapes of my future as an extension of these places and possibly an opportunity for hope, despite a background of worsening climate chaos.
Objectives
Create and define my own language of grief by making extensive, repetitious, non-figurative traces, marks and drawings that speak to feelings of belonging and loss. The materiality of my own grief requires extensive experimentation with mark making tools and a deeply honest dialogue with myself.
Make continuous narratives of these traces by connecting them through drawings on long, fold-out (concertina) sketchbooks and long rolls of paper, canvas and other substrates.
Identify a process for creation and ruination where the original experience is created, erased and the relationship between the two recorded. Channels for ruination include erasure, bleaching, whitewashing, jet washing, scrubbing, sanding, burning, burying.
Explore the landscapes of my past through imagined or remembered places that give me a curated history of personal ancestry and the places that have been significant to me. Create traces of how I imagine or remember those places and record them, identifying their characters and significance at the time and reflected back upon now.
Exploring the physical composition of my present landscape through frottage, drawing, walking, inhaling, gathering, touching, experiencing. Establish a basis for Land/marking where traces emerge from the place itself. Most specifically I will explore those ancient elements of place, such as the Sarsen stones as a segue from myself into ancient places and the ‘collective’ landscape
Imagine the landscapes of the future in the context of climate disaster with a view to understanding wider ruination in the anthropocene and yet the possibility of renewed belonging for myself and for us as a species.
3. Context
Historical context
Of the landscape
Romanticism, the picturesque, the sublime. Philosophical basis for experiential landscape, object/subject
Domination of nature - Ruskin, Arts and Crafts, industrial revolution resistance Walther Benjamin
Land and Environmental art of ‘60s and ‘70s
2. Of expressions of grief and loss
How has grief/loss/death been approached historically in art (classic examples from Goya to Van Gogh, Caspar David Friedrich, Frieda Kahlo, many, many others)
Contemporary context
Contemporary landscape - boundaries of what is relevant and important now
Art and aesthetics of the anthropocene
Attitudes towards death, loss and identity
Theoretical context
Mark making and self - the act of drawing and becoming
Imagination and memory
Public art - rituals of grief and grief expression
Psychology of grief and understanding the stages of grief processing and grief states
Ecofeminism - domination by men of both nature and women
Politics of death and self - identity formation around grieving and loss.
Death positive cultures - strategies for coping with death and grief in contemporary culture
Artists to consider as part of my process research and development
Landscape
John Virtue
Mark Bradford
David Hockney
Peter Doig
Ivor Hitchens
Richard Whadcock
Deborah Tarr
Brian Sindler
David Mankin
Janette Kerr
Kathryn Maple
Andreas Eriksson
Louise Balaam
Richard Long
Amanda Harman
Tacita Dean
Anthropocene and Climate Change
Helen Booth
Olafur Eliasson
Tan Zi Xi
Andy Goldsworthy
Ai WeiWei
Paul Johnstone
Grief, Death, Ruins and other subjects
Käthe Kollwitz
Andrea Burgay
Barbara Walker
Claudette Johnson
Samantha Haring
Lubiana Himid
Catherine Danou
Purdey Fitzherbert
4. Methodology
Language of traces
Trace drawings - regular practice of intuitive mark making
Mark making journal
Observational drawing in the landscape and from imagination
Process is recorded in time lapse video and photographs.
Paint, ink, more traditional painterly and drawing media, such as charcoal, pencils etc
Materiality of grief
Indigo - the borrowed, decorative lens of my early years. My greatest symbol of grief
Charcoal and ash - burning, cremation, ruination also scorched earth, rising from ashes
Gold (context of christian iconography, reverence, also Japanese Kintsugi - repair and hope)
Consider natural substrates from nature locally
Language of ruination
Establishing a process for ruination of the drawings and traces I have created to include
Bleach
Fire
Erasure
Washing
Covering
Rotting, decomposing
Sanding
Eroding
Burial
Traces, drawings and paintings to undergo this cycle of creation and ruination with the process and outcomes to be recorded and reflected upon
Analysis of Japanese boro and preservation, reuse and reframing what is tatty and old. Revisit textile work during CASS Summer School in 2022 and continue to bleach, launder, weather those textiles. Aesthetics of ruination, old walls and photographing those things which are old, antiqued, weathered and beautiful.
Language of my ancestry
Images of Hong Kong and my childhood
Images of my mother
Furniture inlay paper, decorative objects retained within the family
Old Photographs of Hong Kong
Memories and mementoes, so little has been kept
Collection and recording of these objects as memory prompts rather than as source material in themselves.
Collection and recording of my husband’s ancestry and grief - things belonging to his family and his own personal imagery.
Narratives
Long, continuous drawings/trace narratives
Small scale to begin with becoming larger. Concertina sketchbook as a first attempt moving into a continuous roll of paper possibly created outside in the landscape to include many of the creation and ruination traces developed
Possible video of process and creation as well as ruination - part of the Low Residency in March ‘24
Exploration of surfaces, such as old walls (cave paintings)
Bayeux Tapestry at Reading Museum - visited and photographed
Physicality of landscape
Daily dog walks in the Wiltshire Landscape and re/creating traces on those walks
Frottage
Drawing
Gathering
Inhaling
Experiencing - wind, rain, light
Observation and documentation of circadian rhythms, night fall, dawn
Walking and observing
Researching elements such as Sarsen Stones and their history in the West Woods, Lockeridge Dene etc.
Devil’s Dene, The Sanctuary, The Ridgeway, Avebury, Silbury Hill
Forestry England and Wiltshire Council with regards to landscape character assessment - chalk, loam, quartz. Research possible connections.
Bradford on Avon Museum of Ancient Landscapes
Royal Observatory
Observatory at Marlborough College and Night Skies Society of Marlborough
History and folk tales of Wiltshire
Documentation
Documentation will be largely photos and videos
Original work is primarily traces, drawings and paintings
Destruction or partial destruction of work to be photographed, videoed and responded to in writing through the blog but also poetry and creative writing. Reflective writing and discernment will be particularly important as I have a large amount of source material and a lot of ideas to work through. Carefully editing and reflecting on what is working and what not is going to be key. Journaling and meditating are good ways of being honest with myself about what feels right.
5. Outcomes
Drawing and painting are the key and also most obvious outcomes for me and I hope to create a body or bodies of work that show drawing and painting to be as relevant an expression of contemporary themes as ever, if not more. However I hope to explore other fields and break down boundaries of what these approaches are, what they mean and what they might encompass for me.
Large scale, environmental trace narratives that envelope the viewer and offer experiential narratives rather than a passive, viewer experience. I am interested in very long drawings or traces that are presented less flat or against a wall and more three dimensionally for people to walk amongst or become enveloped in. Consider also wall or cave paintings or a site specific trace narrative in forest or around local sarsen stones.
Public scale interaction and a conversation around what grief is for each of us and how to communicate positive grief strategies more openly and helpfully.
Art that ritualises or gives a gentle voice to the landscape and our collective anticipatory grief. Consider a fluid expression of how to ritualise this, using interactive and collaborative channels.
A collection of poems that express all of the above in verbal, prose poetic form.
7. Bibliography
RefWorks ongoing bibliography may be found here
'Mourning in the Anthropocene - Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence', (2019)
The Work of the Dead. (2015) .
The Age of Spectacular Death.
'An atmosphere of grief. Living with loss in the Anthropocene | by Ivor Williams | Medium'
Drawing into Landscape: Contemporary British Painting by Cali, Marco
'Full article: A Terrible Beauty: Art and Learning in the Anthropocene', .
'Full article: Fiery Arts: Pyrotechnology and the Political Aesthetics of the Anthropocene', .
Funny Weather - Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing
Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of Civilisation.
Mindfulness & the Art of Drawing by Wendy Ann Greenhalgh.
Battle, N. (2015) Love, loss & loneliness : a companion in grief
Ben Okri Tiger Work.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Notes on Grief.
Dorothy P. Holinger. 'The Anatomy of Grief', Yale University Press,
Ellis, E.C. (2018) Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
Holloway, T. (2022) 'How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene', Stanford University Press, .
Julian Bell, J.B., Claudia Tobin Ways of Drawing - Artists' Perspectives and Practices.
Katherine Gibson, Deborah Bird Rose and Ruth Fincher 'Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene', .
Leigh, M. (2017) Grief. London: Bloomsbury.
Malcolm, H. (2020) Words for a dying world: stories of grief and courage from the global church. London, England: SCM Press.
Max Porter 'Grief Is the Thing with Feathers | Graywolf Press', .
Todd BradwayLandscape Painting Now By Todd Bradway
Vince, G. (2014) Adventures in the anthropocene: A journey to the heart of the planet we made. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
Wakefield, J.D. (1999) Legendary Landscapes: Secrets of Wiltshire Revealed
Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.