The Gifts of The Departed

Saturday was the launch of the show. I loved the details around it, the specially designed bookmarks for the poetry in the resource area (which are Rumi: Selected Poems and The Gift-Poems by Hafez ), the Persian –influenced menu at the café (would have been VERY approved of by my mother…) and some of the song choices played by the wonderful Manchester String Quartet – ( I felt confusingly uplifted by their rendering of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart.. and more appropriately by the Smiths’ There is a Light That Never Goes Out).

I realize I was too distracted to take any photos myself so once they are up I will add linked to those taken by MCDC, and they also made a film of the day, including of my artist talk so I will post that here eventually. I do feel all talked out, but I think it’s appropriate to post up some of the relevant diary entries I mentioned last time from 2005.I looked at them again and some of them feel just too achingly personal to put in the public realm, so I am posting up those which relate most directly to some of the works on show. The first being Mother Tongue (2010).

They were written to my daughter Delia, who had just been born, on December 2^nd 2004.

‘Your grandmother (4.1.2005)


Delia, your beloved grandmother, who wanted you to call her ‘Papar Jaan’, was swept away by a great tsunami in South East Asia, Phuket Island on 26th December 2004 (last week.)

I am numb. What a huge loss. She adored you so much and had waited for your arrival for many years. She will always be with you my love. 
Rumi says: 
Are you jealous of the oceans generosity? 
Why would you refuse to give
this joy to anyone? 
Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups! 
They swim in the huge fluid freedom.

Reg, her partner who survived and was with her just before the wave hit, told me of her last moments; when the wave came, it took the sea out first and left the fish on the sand. Your Papar Jan, not realising what was going to happen, rushed to pick up the fish and put them back in the sea. Rescuing to the last. Rest in peace.

My Mother’s death: dreams and signs (10.1.2005).


Have been finding it hard to find space to write about what has been happening. But I must record this – last night Mum was in my dream. A younger version of her with jet-black hair, less aged – she was simply being with us – her beautiful, comforting self. I knew she was dead but she was visible as a living presence. 
This weekend we all went to visit Reg (her boyfriend of 5 years who was with her in Phuket and survived- they adored each other). Leo, Delia, Farid, Fariba, Massoud, Simon and I. It was actually lovely to see him but so, so sad that she was not there…We agreed to wait to celebrate her life, not mourn her death.She still has to be found. 
The more we talk about it, the clearer it is there were ‘signs’ – the dream she told us about 3 months ago that of a tidal wave coming to take her away on a beautiful beach…with the comment ‘What an amazing way to die!’ and Simon (your uncles) dream soon after of he and I on a beach waving her goodbye as she got taken by the sea. Her phone calls to all of us on Christmas day, the day before she died. Simon missed her first call and he prayed (he doesnt believe in God) desperately for her to call back in case he never saw her again, which she did. 
I wish I had told her in that phone call how much I loved her – but I know she knew it, we had just spent so much beautiful close time together before she died, preparing for your arrival, during and just after your birth. Deepening our relationship. The relief around that is huge for me’.

Prologue

It is almost 9 years since my mother, Parvin Azadeh Rieu, was swept away in the Asian Tsunami of 2004, an event which not only totally transformed my personal life, but my arts practice too.

Why? perhaps because I felt so connected to thousands of others who had experienced a loss of loved ones in the single same catastrophic event, or maybe partly because my experience of working digitally – focused on the other, the ‘user’ , which was taking me towards another way of working. Also, my MA in 2001 resulted in the creation of public installation works, a new departure. (More on all this later). For whatever combination of reasons, I began to work relationally, that is, I finally broke through the skin of the old paradigm I had so been attached, of solitary artist in studio, to feeling compelled to relate, connect, ask and answer some of the fundamental questions in life, in the public arena. Like, why am I here? What is this creative gift for? How do I relate to society and how it is evolving? How do I process grief, especially given the sudden and very public context in which I have lost my mother? How do I relate to others who have a comparable experience, and communicate this to those who don’t, through my work? Why does it feel important to do this?

This weekend, on Saturday, 1-5pm, I have a small solo show of some of my on-going collection of sculptures, The Gifts of the Departed, opening at Manchester Craft and Design Centre. These began as a creative making ritual of grief, using some of the key elements of my mother’s kitchen, wrapping them in cloth and kilim wool and then binding them with texts taken from my blog at the time, which documented some of the almost unbelievable signs, dreams and events around her death. The collection then expanded into using found object and Sufi texts to create what feel like three dimensional poems. Her death happened 24 days after the birth of my first child (and her first grandchild) Delia – at which she was present. On some level – in my emotional archeology – these two events felt and still feel closely related. Recently I went looking for this blog, which contains diary extracts from the days and weeks following the 2004 Tsunami, and realized it was no longer online. I felt a little shocked.

As part of this show, and also prompted by the devastating and resonant events which have unfolded in the Philippines, I will be re-publishing extracts from this 2005/6 personal blog.

The showing of some of these works is an opportunity for me to reflect both on how these experiences shaped my practice and to consider the wider questions around grief and the creative process, i.e what loss can give birth to if we allow and have the courage to let it. I apologise in advance for anything that comes across as distressing/sentimental/inappropriate , but since the experiences I speak of are so closely woven into the fabric of my creative being, AN seems as good a place as any to be their permanent home.

I will be giving an Artist Talk on grief and the creative process at 3pm this Saturday 23^rd November as part of the launch of the show at MCDC. It is free and all are welcome. It will also be filmed and I will link to it here once it is up.