Firstly some facts: in the past few weeks, two people who I loved very much have died. My Nana, Jean Thain, who was 92, and my dear friend and collaborator, artist and curator Maria Cobo, who has died from cancer aged 33.
This blog is my attempt to deal with these terrible facts, by trying to connect back to my creativity – which is surely the only way I can get through this.
So I suppose this is a kind of grief sketchbook or journal or something.
Grief is a funny thing. For one thing there is no continuity. One day I feel fine and almost ‘normal’, the next I’m a mess and can’t get out of bed. Extremities of feeling are becoming normal. I go from happiness to despair to anger to in a beat. I find I’m behaving in ways I don’t recognise. I’m unfocussed, unpredictable. I feel dislocated from almost everything. Some days I feel like I’m going mad. I’ve been told this is a normal part of grieving, but It’s pretty scary and sometimes unbearable. More so because I can’t seem to find the will or inspiration to make any work, which I’m finding worrying and distressing.
So I need to pull myself out of this pit. Doing a blog and documentating these days via photography, writing, thoughts, reading etc I hope will help me to reconnect to creativity again.
As we as a survival tactic, there’s a practical imperative – I’ve committed to making work for an exhibition as part of the Liverpool Independents Biennial (as part of the SCIBASE collective) which I need to get done by the end of September. I’ve no idea how I’m going to do this, but doing this blog seems a good way to start to try.
