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 23rd 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.
