(PDF) Fragmentation : materialising mourning from complicated grief

FRAGMENTATION: MATERIALISING MOURNING FROM COMPLICATED GRIEF Jules Findley Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Royal College of Art, for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy awarded by the Royal College of Art February 2018 1 2 FRAGMENTATION: Materialising Mourning from Complicated Grief School of Design Royal College of Art Kensington London SW7 February 2018 © Jules Findley This text represents the submission for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Royal College of Art. This copy has been supplied for the purpose of research for private study, on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement 3 4 Fig 9, Curtain of Loss (2012) Jules Findley, 10m x 8m polyester taffeta strips backed on to netting, Chichester Cathedral FRAGMENTATION: MATERIALISING MOURNING FROM COMPLICATED GRIEF The Abstract This research by project is asking whether the affect of embodied materiality can be materialised from complicated grief, in an investigation into the relationship between the affect of grief and the creative, embodied encounters with paper materials. In some types of traumatic loss, complicated grief can subsume the bereaved in a way like no other. Mourning can be a very difficult process. The research integrates creative practice, working with fibre-based materials, with the scholarly and cultural exploration of the literature and theory of mourning as a specific psychological state of mind. It is an exploration of the experience of mourning a complicated grief, through the sustained process of an embodied encounter with the materiality of making paper. Paper becomes the metaphor to discuss research questions that connect the maternal with affect in maternal grief, that paper can be the Symbolic and the body that inputs Cartesian culture is feminised using affect of the embodied encounter with materials. This research is not into art therapy, nor into art as illustrative of psychology. I use a hybrid approach to methodology, involving auto-ethnography and subjective experience as a medium through which to reflect on the relationship between materiality and affect. The substrate uses play; judgment is suspended, whilst the substrate is being handmade to create individual materiality. Culture and social theory, which enabled the methods of auto-ethnography and creative practice research to emerge, is the paradigm of postmodern and post positivist accounts of new relations between ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’. Moving forward from Glaser and Strauss’s thinking on grounded theory, display, together with reflective practice, is compatible with the emergence of feminist thinking on the significance of subjectivity and affect. The submission comprises a written dissertation, which reflects on the six years of creative practice, making new sense of the conventional silence surrounding complex mourning. The practice itself, connotes affect through the materialities of paper. 5 Fig 45, Black thread hand sewn into handmade paper representing bereavement Jules Findley 6 FRAGMENTATION: MATERIALISING MOURNING FROM COMPLICATED GRIEF Contents Page No Copyright Statement 3 The Abstract 5 Contents 7 List of Diagrams and Artworks 9 List of accompanying material 12 Acknowledgements 13 Author’s declaration 15 Chapter 1 The Introduction: Materialisation 17 Why Paper 21 Chapter 2 Paper Materials and The Hand 25 The Importance of the Hand 25 The Practice; Making Paper 31 The Resins 39 The Beginning of Paper 41 The Symbolic Potential of Paper 41 The Experimentation 47 The Presentations 55 The Work in Paper: 59  The ‘Edge of Grief’ 59 Paper Fragmentation and Absorption 63 The Fragmented Portrait Series 65 The Milk and The Ash 73 The Burnings 73 The Paper like Skin 75 The Workshops 79 Chapter 3 Fragmentation – Sleeping Bodies 83 Public Grief 89 Chapter 4 Reviewing the Literature; Good Grief 93 Psychological and Grief 93 Autobiographical Accounts of Grief and Phenomenology 99 Disenfranchised Grief 103 Medicalisation in Grief 109 Chapter 5 From Madness to Method and Back Again 117 The Process: The Poesis of Paper 119 Display and Activism 123 The Influence of the Hapt 127 Play as a Methodology 131 The Reflective Practitioner 135 Chapter 6 Artists Review: Case Studies of Artist’s using Auto-biography with making 137 Käthe Kollwitz 137 Louise Bourgeois 141 Tracy Emin and Louise Bourgeois 145 Ishiuchi, Miyako 149 Ai Weiwei 151 Richard Tuttle and Martha Tuttle 153 Chapter 7 Knowledge in the Work Embodied Materiality and Grief    157 Hand-made paper and emotions 159 Temporality in the work 159 Chapter 8 Conclusions  165 Bibliography 176 Appendices 191 7 8 Fig 7, I Never had the Chance (2012), 2m x 1m Installation of 72 pieces of baby matinée jackets, Chichester Cathedral LIST OF DIAGRAMS AND ARTWORKS List of Diagrams and Artworks Photographs and diagrams are by Jules Findley Cover picture: Edge of Grief (2015) Fig 1 ‘Diagram to illustrate Fragmentation: Materialising Complicated Grief through use of materials, process and theory’. Nothing is in isolation; each area informs each other p26 Fig 2 ‘Diagram to illustrate the use of Mixed Method Research Methodologies; how they were considered and used in the Research Project’ p120 Fig 3 ‘Diagram to illustrate the contribution to knowledge from practice research.’ Each part of research and practice informs each other p160 Fig 4 ‘Diagram to show the Research Journey and Paradigm Shifts 2012 – 2018’ p116 Fig 5 Hanging by a Thread (2015) 100cm x 80cms part of the Fragmented Portrait Series p64, p66 Fig 6 Edge of Grief I, II and III (2015) 2m x 2m handmade paper suspended by monofilament p56, p58, p60, p124, p126, 198 Fig 7 I Never had the Chance (2012) 2m x 1m Installation of 72 pieces of baby matinée jackets p8 Fig 8 ….and I will Always Love You (2012) 3m x 3m cream-coloured blanket, embroidered p30 Fig 9 Curtain of Loss (2012) 10m x 8m polyester taffeta strips backed on to netting p4, p195 Fig 10 Author with ‘without a body’ 2015 p202 Fig 11 Lost life, Lost love, Lost time (2013) 200mm x 200mm x40mm Acrylic Resin p38 Fig 12 Memento Mori 2 (2013) 200mm x 200mm x40mm Acrylic Resin with Sellotape tin p40 Fig 13 Tears (2013) polyester taffeta strips with wool tops stitched together p34 Fig 14 Without a Body (2015-2018) 15-18cm or 4 -6 inch bodies made out of paper clay p18, p20, p22, p82 p84, p86, p108 Fig 15 Shame (2017) 20cm bodies made out of paper clay p88 Fig 16 Absence (2017) 15cm body made out of paper clay p106 Fig 17 Absence 1 (2017) 15cm bodies made out of white modelling clay p92 Fig 18 Pain (2013) A1 Paper poster p128 Fig 19 Hand-made sheet paper, brown sized with milk p28 Fig 20 Hand-made sheet paper, green with iron filings p52, p74 Fig 21 Hand-made sheet paper, pink p122 Fig 22 Hand-made sheet paper, black p112 Fig 23 Hand-made sheet paper, rust p42 9 LIST OF ARTWORKS CONTINUED Fig 24 Hand-made sheet paper, pink with a tray of milk p146 Fig 25 Fragmented portrait sewn with black sheet paper with ash 21grams p70 Fig 26 Fragmented portrait sewn with pink sheet paper with ash 21grams p162 Fig 27 Fragmented portrait sewn with brown sheet paper with ash 21grams p68 Fig 28 Soil painting painted during residence in Saskatoon, Canada, May 2017 p144 Fig 29 Bowl of residue water after the substrate has been used up p50 Fig 30 Black substrate ready to be smoothed out through the grid p44 Fig 31 Hand soaking up excess water from grid p24 Fig 32 Domestic blender for making the paper into pulp p46 Fig 33 Ash from the burnings p98, p100 Fig 34 Figure wrapped in paper towelling p102 Fig 35 Bodies ready to be transported in picnic container p140 Fig 36 Paper clay ready to be used p114 Fig 37 Spontaneous reaction from member of the public p174 Fig 38 Papermaking workshop p78, p109 Fig 39 Grid ready to be taken off paper p48 Fig 40 Burnings of paper to make ash p96, p174 Fig 41 Pleated paper from Genesis using a Princess Pleater p11 Fig 42 Pleated paper oiled using a Princess Pleater p76 Fig 43 Stitched handmade paper with dark red thread (2013) p16 Fig 44 Pleated paper with needles in from Princess Pleater p14 Fig 45 Black thread hand sewn into handmade paper representing bereavement p6 Fig 46 Kitchen cloth absorbing the paper substrate p54 Fig 47 The paper clay figures are fragile, eventually the bodies return to dust p118 Fig 48 Work in Progress Banner p130 Fig 49 Reflections from Notebooks p132, p134 10 11 Fig 41, Pleated paper from Genesis using a Princess Pleater List of Accompanying Material Appendix: Contents: 1. Glossary of Terms 2. Digital Artist Residence September 2017 3. How the research journey began with the exhibition at Chichester Cathedral 4. Raw Feedback from participants LOSS, 2012 and Edge of Grief (Why Would I Lie), 2015 5. Feedback from DRS16 workshop Making Paper 6. Research Journey at RCA, conferences and work in progress shows 7. Fashion in Death Published Paper, Hong Kong 2014 Memory Stick: 1. Film 2. Interview 3. Digital copy of thesis 4. Curriculum Vitae 12 Acknowledgements I dedicate this project to my son, and posthumously to my parents, especially my mother. Without the losses of the people close to me, I would never have had the emotional capacity or depth of understanding to be able to carry out this work. Thanks go to my supervisors, Dr Claire Pajaczkowska, Senior Research Tutor, Textiles and Freddie Robins, Senior Tutor and Reader in Textiles Royal College of Art, for expanding my horizons, their hard work and dedication and for helping me to get through some very hard times during the making of this project. I would like to thank Professor Chika Ohgi, from Nagoya University, for teaching me that paper is a universal material and, like mathematics, art has no language barriers; to Susan Cutts for helping me strive for quality in my papermaking; that imperfections are part of normal life, and make us who we are; to Tecni-Cable for continuing to supply me with steel cable and exhibition-worthy material; to Bob Pain at Omni Colour, who have constantly supported my reprographics in exhibitions; to Anne Toomey, Head of Textiles at the Royal College of Art, for arranging my tutorial with Visiting Professor Marie O’Mahoney, to Dr Sarah Desmarais for reading my drafts and Cathy Johns for proofreading. Thanks to Martha Harris for her InDesign advice; thank you all for being specifically helpful. Others who had influence on my work and determination are my wider family, my sister Carole King, my close friends who have stuck by me throughout incredibly difficult losses and the journeys of my life: you know who you are; thank you for not letting me give up, and encouraging me forward. The Royal College of Art, and Southern Rail for the many delays, allowing me the time to write on the train. Thank you everyone. 13 14 Fig 44, Pleated paper with needles in from Princess Pleater Author’s declaration During the period of registered study in which this thesis was prepared the author has not been registered for any other academic award or qualification. The material included in this thesis has not been submitted wholly or in part of any academic award of qualification other than that for this it is now submitted Signature: Date: 14 February, 2018 15 16 Fig 43, Stitched handmade paper with dark red thread (2013) CHAPTER 1 THE INTRODUCTION: Materialisation ‘An emotion is the way we find ourselves in our relation to beings and thus the same time in relation to ourselves; the way we are attuned in relation to beings that we are not and to beings that we are. In emotion, the state opens and holds itself open, in which we have dealings with objects, ourselves and human beings. The emotion is itself this open state…. Here it is important to realise that the emotion has the nature of opening and holding open, and it therefore can be concealing’1 Warning: The material that is contained in this thesis is of a sensitive nature. Consideration should be made as to whether to continue reading. This research project asks whether the affect of embodied materiality can be materialised from complicated grief, in an exploration of experiencing complicated mourning through a sustained process of an embodied encounter with the materiality of making paper. The sustained exploration of mourning that became the aim of this research originated in both subjective and objective realities: my life experiences of grief and my sense that the significance of the work of mourning is still largely absent from shared cultural and social realities of daily life. Public investment in bereavement and funds for counselling are highly constrained. Many rites that were traditionally performed by families and communities, have been sanitised by funeral homes. Often support from communities has been dissipated through various reasons, due to societal changes in the last seventy years. There are areas of complicated grief and mourning that have become recognised as an issue of critical, and legislative, urgency to government policy,2 with information from professionals in family law providing data on the toxic effects of grief, seen in manifestations such as in pathogenic parenting or parental alienation.3 The project examines fragmentation by exploring the raw edge and substrate of 1 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Erster Band (Neske, Pfullingen, 1989), p.119 2 BBC Nov 2017 see bibliography for websites 3 Parental alienation, or pathogenic parenting is on a spectrum, the pure form is the cross -generational alliance of the aligned narcissistic or borderline parent makes with the child against the other parent. It is a heinous and vengeful act, made by one parent against the other, and the child spurns the non-aligned parent in the process.of this emotional abuse. Only in emotional abuse does this rejection of the other, ‘targeted’ parent exist. The cross-generational alliance where the aligned parent transmits the transgression of usually the historical unresolved family trauma to the child. involves the child to binary split, viewing the aligned parent as ‘all good’ and the targeted’ parent as ‘all bad’, causing harm to the developing psyche of the child. What could have taken a few minutes may take a lifetime to recover, especially if the child stays with the aligned alienating paernt. Cafcass (Children and Family Court Advisory Support Service, see Glossary in Appendix), as of 2018, recognises parental alienation as high-conflict divorce, can come about after years of ligitgation against the targeted parent. Parental alienation is instigated by one narcissistic/borderlineparent with a mental illness, due to the way they were brought up, they are mentally programmed to make the ex-spouse either the ex-mother or ex-father to their child.Unless the trauma is resolved and healed, as it can be generational. It affects potentially around 80,000 children in the UK annually. (Numbers from Cafcass). 17 Fig 14, Without a Body (2015-2018), 15cm or 4 inch figures made out of paper clay paper, using paper clay in relation to grief, and the rawness we feel when we are bereaved at the onset of mourning. The breadth of grief and mourning was a large landscape; it spanned the history of funerals, traditional and contemporary funeral rites, procedures of grief in stages from initial loss to acceptance of the reality. I visited trade fairs, gaining a profound understanding of the area of thanatology. This provided a rich context in which to consider emerging rituals and processes in the contemporary area of grief. There are around 530,000 deaths annually in England and Wales;4 bereavement and grief impacts on relatives and friends that affects many each year. The two 4 Office for National Statistics, Deaths registered in England and Wales, 2016 (London: Office for National Statistics, 2017) available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/ birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsregisteredinenglandandwalesseriesdrreference- tables [accessed 30 December 2017] 18 least-discussed deaths in the UK are the death of a child and suicide (usually male); in both areas its representation, discussion, and therefore mourning, are still taboo. The effect of the death of my grandfather impacted on my family; I was five years old when I realised that with death there was change, as my grandmother moved house. In the mid 1990s, I experienced many deaths of my homosexual friends who died from HIV/AIDS-related illnesses. In March1995, my father died suddenly, a few days after I had nursed a close friend who died a slow painful death of HIV/AIDS. During this period, I attended seven funerals in nearly as many weeks. The average age (apart from my father), was around thirty. These bereavements, suffered personally, gave me an experience of death and grief. Tragically, in 2006 my second baby died; less than six months afterwards, my mother died after a short illness. Six weeks after my mother was buried, my husband abandoned us as a family, to go and live with someone else in a different city. After my divorce, for the next eight years my ex-husband persistently took me to court, often bringing two court cases against me at the same time, triangulating our son into the proceedings and manipulating him into believing it was all my fault, rather than the facts. The court cases were something I did not want, or ask for. Following the seventh court case, my son’s father brought about a proposed change of residence against me in 2013. The decision of the local court decided in June 2014 that residence should be continued with me, as mother. The day after, my ex-husband, through a frightening rage of jealousy, made a cross-generational alliance with my son with transgression from his own childhood. In doing so, he turned our son against me and prevented my son from returning to his home with me. In the process, he damaged our son’s psyche, his ‘self’, which remains damaged. Our son psychologically ‘split’:5 dad all good, mother all bad. My son was 11 years and 10 months. Since then, my son has not been back to his maternal home. ‘The love that we share with a child may be our strongest experience of a love that is unqualified and unconditional... If we then lose that child, we are doubly bereaved and our dreaded world becomes our assumptive world.’ 6 In the mother’s world, this double bereavement includes judgement from society, community, relations and friends. There are a number of different types of grief grouped together 5 As described by Julia Kristeva, discussing Melanie Klein’s version of ‘splitting’: Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, [1941] (New York, Oxford: University Press 1989), p.18. 6 Murray Parkes and Holly Prigerson, Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life, (London Penguin: 2010), p.144 19 20 Fig 14, Fig 31 Hand soaking up excess water from grid (2015-2018), 15-18cm or 4 -6 inch bodies made out of paper clay by professionals under the name of ‘complicated grief’: one of these is disenfranchised grief. Disenfranchised grief is where the loss (that of a loved object, thing, person or ideal or a relationship), is not recognised by society, and by its nature is complex. Society is unable, or unwilling, to give of their support or empathy to this bereaved group. Because social recognition of mourning is significantly absent from the culture of everyday life, mourning for these sufferers is more difficult than it is for the ‘normally’ accepted and conventionally bereaved. Complicated grief through a traumatic event is the one of the most terrible and tragic forms of grief. It is difficult to resolve, and can be long lasting. More than being a sustained objective research into the social and cultural rituals of bereavement and funeral rites, I had no preconception that the research would be turned in on myself. The emotional intensity of the meaning of this research has been heightened since my son was wrenched from my life. The experience I feel is that of a living loss: robbed of my son’s teenage years and the privilege of this aspect of parenthood. The methodology and focus for this research changed as a result of what happened; auto-ethnographical methods became included as part of my methodology. Rather than looking at the more general aspects of death, which was my original focus, complicated grief and maternal aspects of mourning, together with the social, cultural and political realities, became the focus of this research. Why Paper? Paper is paricularly suited to the materialisation of mourning due to the dissolution of paper into its constituent parts, that compelled further investigation. The ability of water to decompose material and render it into its essential elements is not unlike the ability of grief to ‘undo’ the defences of a ‘self composure’. Later on in my research, the substrate became the metapor for connoting complicated grief, and a living loss where grief revisits and it is in managing the loss is where the substrate began to take on its own properties. I ‘discovered’ paper at a specific point by using a Princess Pleater;7 (designed for smocking, Fig 44 ), used in my case for experimentation, I commenced by pleating layers of paper – loose, fragile pages, including some from an unbound missal and some lightweight pages of a discarded pocket-sized Bible, (Fig 41)8. 7 See Glossary for a more detailed explanation of a Princess Pleater. 8 Contemporary Bible paper, Indian paper or scritta paper, lightweight, 40gms – 60gms, containing titanium oxide or other high grade pigments to improve its opacity. 21 Fig 14, Without a Body (2015-2018), 15-18cm or 4 -6 inch bodies made out of paper clay The combined gravity of Genesis and the fragility of paper made me want to transform it into pleated paper and sometimes oiled paper, using olive oil, a domestic material. I realised that paper could act like skin, had fragile properties, and it could be materialised,embody memory fragments within its substrate. to become a conduit for grief. My creative practice and application before paper was research within the Textiles programme, using textile materials, such as calico, hand-knitted pieces, torn fabrics, and stitched cloth, presented as installation pieces. 22 My first efforts in making hand-made paper began with a series in which, once the paper had dried, I stitched it using either black or red thread. The black thread at the time symbolised mourning and the red thread symbolised anger and pain. The in-depth analysis of paper made in depth is in Chapter 2. The practice chapters, 2 and 3, are particularly sensitive, as the work was made in the rawness of personal grief. Intrigued by the materiality of paper, its fragility, I started to research the context. I found several different fields of practice, including design for sustainable funerals, that include paper clothing for material remains, the craftsmanship of papermaking, and artists who use paper as expressive material. My work seemed to direct my attention to the second and third of these fields of practice. The questions of the cultural impact of grief and mourning spans all three areas. Is it possible to connote these different emotions, these feelings of grief, ‘through’ paper or ‘with’ paper, examining raw edges, tearing, and ripping? Could the artworks offer a metaphor for discussions about death through my research? The absence of the discussion of mental health is a national issue, especially when the younger members of the royal family have taken it upon themselves to campaign for national awareness in mental health issues. Could my art practice join the public discussion in this emotional arena? Recent governmental reports,9 and new research funding that has resulted, are changing the landscape of creative work associated with mental health. Reviewing the literature in Chapter 4, I have selected authors from the varied and expansive literature around death, bereavement, emotions and grief whose writing is relevant to my research. Chapter 5 discusses the methodologies of the thesis, through the madness of grief. In particular I write about auto-ethnography: play as a methodology, is one of the important aspects of experimentation, which is linked to paper-making as a craft/praxis. As part of my methodology I write about aspects of display, in which I have increased my skills and experience. Chapter 6 is a review of the work of artists including Käthe Kollwitz, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Miyako Ishiuchi, Richard Tuttle and Martha Tuttle. In Chapter 7 the knowledge produced in the thesis is examined, together with the next steps in my research. The conclusions are found in Chapter 8, in which the continued direction of my work is discussed. 9 United Kingdom, House of Lords, Question for Short Debate, ‘Arts: Contribution to Education, Health and Emotional Well-being’, (25 July 2013, vol 747, col 1508) https://hansard.parliamentuk/Lords/2013-07-25/debates/13072529000245/ArtsContributionTo EducationHealthAndEmotionalWell-Being?highlight=arts%20mental%20health#contribution- 13072529000110 [accessed 30 December, 2017] 23 24 Fig 31, Hand soaking up excess water from grid CHAPTER 2 PAPER MATERIALS AND THE HAND The Importance of the Hand The skill in the making of hand-made paper lies in the hands, as it is the hands that conduct most of the information being processed to manufacture the product. Using hands is a vital part of my practice research in making individual pieces, particularly the installations, such as the Fragmented Portrait Series 2015 -2017, (Fig. 5) and Edge of Grief I, II and III 2015 (Fig. 6). Paper made by hand is in many ways a mystery of process, dissolving dry matter into water, making a substrate to the correct thickness and consistency, then, using a mesh, draining the water from the substrate to make a new material, something I returned to repeatedly. In making sheet paper and in making from paper clay, I was fascinated by the processes of liquefying solids and solidifying liquids. The individual fibres of the paper materials, compressed to make a solid paper sheet, could also be returned to the state of substrate, being dissolved or suspended in water. It involves using the hands with other fundamental elements, such as water, that creates a new material or the objects. I was absorbed by the repetition and thought that if I could share my paper-making process with others, I would be able to create a space that would allow the ‘work’ to ‘speak to me’ about itself. Using the hands promotes a strong interconnection in the cognition, hand and reflection process needed to make an artefact. This ‘language’ is discussed in Frank Wilson’s book, The Hand: in particular, the chapters, ‘The Articulate Hand’1 and ‘The Hand-Thought-Language Nexus’,2 in which the discussion of the hand, making, writing and self-reflection takes place. Agreeing with Robertson Davies3 when he writes: ‘the hand speaks to the brain as surely the brain speaks to the hand’, is one of the reasons that I undertook the research by project, instead of a traditional written thesis. Frederick Wood Jones writes: ‘It is not the hand that is perfect, but the whole nervous mechanism by which movements of the hand are evoked, coordinated, and controlled.’4 Richard Sennett5 writes about the metaphor of the physical grip of the hand and then letting go - letting go mentally of a problem to reflect on 1 Frank Wilson, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture, (New York: Pantheon Books,1998), Chapter 10, pp.182-p.209 2 Ibid., Chapter 2, pp.35-p.60 3 Ibid.,p.60 Wilson writes on Robertson Davies, ‘What’s Bred in the Bone’ (NewYork: Penguin 1986) in the context of how things work 4 Frederick Wood Jones, The Principles of Anatomy as Seen in the Hand (Baltimore: Williams and Williams, 1942), pp.298- 299 5 Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, (London: Penguin Allen Lane, 2008), p150; p152 25 Materials Knitwear Paper Paper Clay OUTPUT DISSEMINATION Paper installations Conferences 4” figures Exhibitions Bent figure ‘Shame’ Residence in Canada Portraits Residence online Video recording of NEW Collecting feedback burnings and ash KNOWLEDGE Process Methods in Theory Making presentation Grief The hand Paper as Mourning Interaction symbolic Complicated grief Research methods Methods in Psychology of grief Methods of papermaking practice Attachment Reflection Empathy Fig 1 Diagram to illustrate Fragmentation: Materialising Complicated Grief through use of materials, process and theory. Nothing is in isolation; each area informs each other - Jules Findley 26 it before re-approaching the problem once more. The physical and cognitive are able to work in tandem, to let go of an obsession or fear, scrutinising the metaphor of surrendering control, ‘letting go’. In death, there is a process of letting go: the dying have to let go of life and the relatives have to let go of the dying. In the loss of anything, acceptance can be hard.6 When applied to making, to have a grip is essential, and yet also having sensitivity when handling the paper: the paper is in a delicate and fragile state when nearing the drying period. The hand is tactile: touch is vital in making paper. Richard Sennett believes hands are so important that our hands are our intelligence;7 Sennett cites Kant: ‘the hand is the window on to the mind’.8 As humans, touch is something learnt as a baby, touch is a sense like taste, sight, smell. Touch is sensitive, silent, yet it can evoke emotions, the physical, memory; in the sighted, touch is under-appreciated, taken for granted.9 As artists, part of knowledge in craft and creative practice is the developing and honing of the skills of the hand in order to further knowledge. Winnicott’s research observed the child learning to face outwards from the maternal, saying: ‘out of the material of the imaginative elaboration of body functioning…the psyche is forged’.10 Bowlby researched into healthcare and maternal separation from the child patient, which lead to anxiety and mourning.11 His seminal research changed the way NHS treated children in patient care, influencing healthcare provision, even today. Both Winnicott and Bowlby realised how much children invest in ‘transitional objects’, learning how to care about others and material things through play. The theme of sustainability had impacted on my project proposal at the application stage, in the form of degradable clothing for the cremation or burial of mortal remains.12 The facility with which paper can be transformed to fire, 6 John Bowlby, The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds [John Bowlby, ‘Attachment and Loss: Volume 3 Loss: Sadness and Depression’[1980] (Random House Group Ltd Pimlico 1998) p.29] (Routledge Classics London, New York 2005), p.74 7 Raymond Tallis, The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry in Human Being, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), p.4 8 Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (London: Penguin, Allen Lane 2008), p.149 cites Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy:(The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Imannuel Kant) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), Kindle Edition 9 Bessel Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma, (London: Penguin 2015), See Chapter 4 p.71 10 Donald Winnicott, The Child, The Family, and the Outside [1964] (Cambridge MA: Da Capo Press, 1992), p.52 11 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss: Volume 3 Loss: Sadness and Depression, [1980] (Random House Group Ltd. Pimlico, 1998), p.40 12 Many forms of mixed fibre clothing used in full burial will not degrade, and many synthetics, especially polyesters if burnt give off toxic fumes. 27 28 Fig 19, Hand-made sheet paper, brown sized with milk ash or base matter was not a question of emotional value to me. By working with the process of papermaking and its alchemical quality of materialisation and dematerialisation, sustainability has resurfaced in a different form: this has meaning and value (Fig 1). If the papermaking is not going well, and dries to the wrong consistency, it has the facility to be re-shredded, re-torn and remade into new paper in the same way as unfired clay. The hand-making part of papermaking is part of the process of my research, as it is my hand that controls much of the process and consistency, and at times adding bits of memorabilia, shredded textiles into fabric bits, cutting hair, photographs, threads, all of these personal additions can be added by hand into the making. Practice from the context of making, ‘praxic movement’, is described by Wilson as the intent of the hand, ‘perforce a sign for the act which it accomplishes, irrespective of the communicative intent of the doer.’13 The same hand also wipes away the tears, and copes with grief by mopping up the daily spillages. This maternal hand also loves a child and cares for the elderly. It is a compassionate hand, and it is this hand that makes paper, even metaphorically. 13 Frank R. Wilson, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture, (New York: Pantheon Books,1998).p.204 29 30 Fig 8, ….and I will Always Love You (2012), 3m x 3m cream-coloured blanket, embroidered in black woollen thread THE PRACTICE: MAKING PAPER Creating a substrate was experimental: it could be left to chance, or it could be made more scientific by following a recipe, measuring exact quantities of water and proportionally altering the mix, recording each instance. Paper as a material is versatile, the sheets once dried can be sewn together to form larger sheets or made into larger sheets at the wet sheet stage, it can be made into sculpture or when dried used in conjunction interactively, with open-source electronics with reaction to touch, light or sound. Paper can be made following traditional craft processes used for thousands of years or be explored, using modern substances such as silicon at the substrate stage, in exploring new making processes. Paper was not an instant material for connoting my research: it took time for paper to emerge, as paper had not entered onto my creative horizon until I researched more deeply into the area of bereavement, attachment and loss. Examining Raw Edges Re-examining two out of the four installations made for the exhibition ‘LOSS’, 2012, exhibited at Chichester Cathedral14 became the initial starting points for my research. The piece was a cream-coloured, woven wool blanket, 2m x 2m, with a new, vintage 1960s bri-nylon slip, pale apricot in colour, sewn onto the main body of the blanket, dedicated to my mother and called ‘…and I will Always Love You’: 2012, and the shift petticoat sewn loosely into the middle part of the blanket, Along the top of the blanket was sewn, in white appliqué letters, ‘Dear Mum’ in black embroidered wool thread, sewn on along the bottom of the blanket ‘…and I will Always Love You.’ These were the last words I said to my mother in August 2006, before she lost consciousness and died. I knew she had heard them, as she had acknowledged and understood these words. It was a moment of strong love and peace in the somewhat cold, stark hospital room. In making this piece, I wrote the words for the blanket, which was mounted beside the exhibit to introduce the exhibit to the public. 14 In February - March 2012, I organised an exhibition called ‘LOSS’ in the north transept of Chichester Cathedral with Alice Kettle. I produced four large installations, the introductory piece was (Fig 9, page 4) ‘The Curtain of Loss’ (2012), made from torn strips of polyester taffeta fabric sewn on to net at the top hung from a tensile steel cable spanning 10 metres. 31 ‘…and I will Always Love You’ (2012) “The idea of a mother’s unconditional love is taken for granted, but once lost whether it is taken away, or through death, is a loss to us all. In death, there is also love. We are quick to acknowledge that love is part of birth, but love is also with us in death. Grief is the price we pay for love. When our relationships end, there is the pain of mourning our loss, and the pain of love is ever present as we cared for that person. We remember them by celebrating their life and re affirming our life and their love of us. Objects can contain the memory of someone, and is a symbolism of their love. Remembering the love from a loss, whilst we live creates a possibility of everlasting love and remembrance.” Words written by Jules Findley to introduce the piece ‘…and I will always love you’, 2012. (Fig 8 p.30) When my mother died, I was a mother myself and my mother’s grandson (my son), was two weeks away from being four years old. The maternal was already included in my work in 2012, within the installations in the cathedral that considered both the loss of the mother and the lost child. The second installation I re-examined while reflecting on my research was a large installation consisting of seventy-two pieces of hand-knitting from eighteen babies’ matinée jackets, from a knitting pattern found in my mother’s effects after she had died. Turney15 views knitwear as a narrative, with a beginning, a middle and an end. My mother had knitted the same matinée jacket for me as a baby and had knitted the jacket for her grandson when he was a baby. ‘I Never Had the Chance’ (2012) “How often do we go through life and relationships and think, ‘I never had the chance’, whether it’s to say a few words, a kiss, or a gift, for remembrance? When a child dies we lose the expectation of that life, of loving, of hugging, of watching them grow up. The ideal of seeing your child go to school, marriage and the opportunity of seeing your family grow evaporates as the pain, emptiness and sadness takes the place of joy. Life is precious, we don’t necessarily get what we want or think we deserve. Although time heals the wound, the situation still remains. We appreciate life more keenly, but we are changed. Words written by Jules Findley to introduce my installation, I Never had the Chance, 2012, which was mdf board painted black fitted on the ceiling of the scaffold, suspending 72 or so hand-knitted unfinished baby matinée jackets using black double knitting yarn, exhibited in 15 Joanne Turney, ‘The Culture of Knitting’ (Oxford: Berg, 2009), p.171 32 Chichester Cathedral, 2012 (Fig 7, page 8). Hand-knitting patterns, with their stitch instructions, have attracted me for a long time, and all through the period that my mother was in intensive care, I took my hand-knitting with me as I could knit and chat to my mother.16 At the time, I was knitting a new blanket for my son. Repetition of making in hand-knitting stills the mind; knitting has been called a ‘vehicle for communicating stability in unstable times,’17 in the examination of the renewal of the knitting phenomenon as the ‘new domesticity’.18 Hand-knitting in the early days of bereavement was a source of comfort to me. Wearing my mother’s jumpers made me feel hugged by my Mum - they still smelt of her,19 until they were washed, then they smelt similar to other pieces of my own knitwear; soon afterwards they lost their allure. I had retained some of my mother’s soaps that she kept in a drawer. I put the old soaps in with the knitwear in my chest of drawers in an effort to recreate the scent that would transfer to her knitwear. The hope was that the knitwear would absorb the same scent from the soaps she had collected during her lifetime, that the jumpers would smell of her again. The experiment didn’t work for me. The sweaters did not smell of her anymore, may be my nose had become accustomed to the scent, and it did not have the same effect as it did in the recent months after her death. Recently however, on giving away one or two of Mum’s sweaters to my sister, she said she could smell our mother; my experiment may have worked after all. The desperate need I felt for my mother hugging me passed with time. Smell is a sense that cannot be seen or felt; whether the person is sighted, blind or mute, however, it stirs the brain to remember the scent of a deceased relative or friend, and this is why perfume evokes a powerful memory. 16 My hand-knitting was not voyeurism, like ‘Les Tricoteuses’: quite the reverse, it was comforting and helped to still my mind. See Ann Hood The Knitting Circle, (New York: Avon, 2008), p.97 17 Joanne Turney, The Culture of Knitting, (Berg 2009), p.21 18 Ann Hood, The Knitting Circle, (Avon, 2008), p.97 -118 19 Peter Stallybrass, ‘Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning and the Life of Things’, The Yale Review, 81 (1993), 35-75, p.36, connects the idea of the scent engrained in the cloth of jacket’s ability to make human connections with the emotions and memory. 33 34 Fig 13, Tears (2013), Jules Findley Polyester taffeta, situated on one of the mausoleums in the wooded area of West Norwood Cemetery It was through tearing the fabric that I was attracted to making paper, I enjoyed the noise of the ripping of fabric when I made The Curtain of Loss (2012). I tore the material to make thin strips of fabric, which were machine-stitched onto netting as backing to make the finished result appear translucent. The netting gave the piece structure; the strands could dangle freely, reacting to the movement and gentle air flow within the cathedral without becoming knotted. Reflecting on tearing as process from the The Curtain of Loss, I re-used the idea of torn fabric in a different format for the installation of Tears (2013), dressing a mausoleum in West Norwood Cemetery. In 2013, I was invited to submit work to a summer trail event in West Norwood Cemetery. Two of my pieces were accepted; the first was a large square resin, 200mm x 200mm x 40mm containing vintage jewellery, a timer and bird skull in a modern ‘memento mori’, (Fig 11 page 38) Lost life, Lost love, Lost time (2013). The resin was inserted into one of the wooden containers where normally caskets of ashes would be placed, in the Columbarium. The other was an installation called Tears, dressing one of the mausoleums in the woodland as part of the outdoor trail. Tears in crying and ‘tearing’ fabric (tears) are the same word, and spelled the same way. West Norwood Cemetery is on an enormous scale, and my work was one of 26 exhibits in 40 acres of grounds. I sent over sketches and sewn samples; these were approved by the curator. The installation was designed to appear as if tears (weeping) - or tears of fabric, would overflow from the brick and stone, and permission had been given to use fabric to cover the door and sides of the mausoleum. I decided to write an introduction piece as I had written about all my other large installations that had been exhibited at Chichester Cathedral. They introduced the piece into the space. ‘Tears’ was no exception. I wrote the words about the piece in a slightly petic and factual way. The writings were inspired by listening to ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’, a series made in 2010 for BBC Radio 4 on the important artefacts in the British Museum, narrated in a programme that lasted ten iminutes by the Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor. The words are nothing like as grand as the information that is narrated, but I lked the factual manner to which the objects were presented and they were described well for radio. I tried to make my writings about grief pognant and personal for the receiver when they approached the installation on display. 35 ‘TEARS’ (2013) “In the early stages of grief, tears flow as a river and sometimes it’s very difficult to control the weeping. In this piece, using strands of ripped taffeta and strands of melted plastic, the mausoleum appears to be filled with tears flowing out from the openings, from the door and from the two vents on either side. Tears also stands for ‘tears’ of ripped fabric, (same spelling, different pronunciation) as our lives are torn apart in the initial stages of bereavement. The installation tries to describe the unrelenting sorrow and pain that is experienced in the bereavement of a loved one. Being bereaved, some people are unable to cry and just feel sad, others weep and continue to weep. In this special place, surrounded by leaves, trees and woodland, this is a peaceful place either to be still or shed tears in privacy…” Words written to introduce the installation of Tears, (2013) Jules Findley consisting of ripped taffeta torn into strips, placed on one of the mausoleums in the woodland (Fig13 page 34) The word ‘tears’ can be ambiguous. Simon Baron-Cohen notes, in a chapter on Autism,20 that the interpretation of the sentence, ‘she had a tear in her eye,’ whereas a neuro-typical interpretation understands this is a reference to emotional experience, the response of a person with Asperger syndrome is to interpret this as a ‘physical’ damage to the organ of the eye, or an act of violence. The torn edge of cloth or paper material is a powerful expression of this ambiguity. The damaged materiality connotes the emotional response of violence, and also the way that an intense experience of grief can be experienced as a ‘tearing apart’ of the more contained or controlled self. The torn edges of cloth reveal the fibres that constitute the surface. Woven surfaces can function as symbols of social unity and the meshing of self and others, such as in metaphors such as ‘the tapestry of life’ ‘the warp and weft of society’, ‘the social fabric’ and others, such as the unhealthy didactic fusion of ‘enmeshment’. The curator did not like the partially installed installation of ‘Tears’ (Fig 13), and without prior discussion, tore it down. The act of tearing it down without interpretation or communication was a violence that made me feel as if I had failed. My research grew from this event, and I learnt about the expectations of the curator; realising this was not part of my research, I turned away from the 20 Simon Baron-Cohan, The Essential Difference (London: Penguin 2012), p.136 36 speculation of selecting materials, and death. I decided to confine my materials to the hand-making of paper, to allow me to explore and research the emotional aspect of grief in a focussed manner. This was an importatn event and I felt the paradigm shift in my research during the summer. Beeman21 states that language, although good at communicating information, is ‘deficient in conveying affective states to others’ - however, this is not true of art. The nuanced language of display and the unspoken language of affect worked into a creative artwork, awakens an emotional state for the viewer’s gaze, in a similar but in a different way, in performative art. Learning from the experience in the woodland, and understanding the expectations of the curator, were a symbiosis; if the two were mismatched then there would be dissonance. 21 Helena Wulf, The Emotions: A Cultural Reader, ed. Helena Wulf (Oxford, New York: Berg, (2007), p.288 37 38 Fig 11, Lost life, Lost love, Lost time (2013), 200mm x 200mm x40mm Acrylic Resin THE RESINS Using resin as a material examined encapsulated memory. Some of the larger pieces were exhibited at the annual Work in Progress show at the Royal College of Art, Kensington, London, in January 2014. All the small but memorable, personal clutter surrounding someone’s life is gathered up and preserved forever in memory in clear resin. I first experimented with a very feminine piece, which contained lipstick, a fragment of a wedding dress, non-precious jewellery, a bottle of perfume and buttons. The liquid contained in the small half bottle of perfume remained liquid and moved within the piece once finished. The second large resin I made was a vintage piece, (Fig 11, page 38), and was a conscious attempt at a modern memento mori, containing a brooch, necklaces, a timer filled with sand, small bird’s skull, buttons, and a small half-filled bottle of perfume. Examining the Dutch old master oil paintings featuring the symbolism of time and death motivated me to continue experimenting with making the resin pieces with personal memorabilia using contemporary semiotics. The final large resin I made was more masculine, made of stationery and engineering bits included pieces from my father’s clutter, such as a Sellotape tin, a small ruler, pencils and a sharpener (Fig 12, page 40). Making the resins, keeping small objects, encasing, entrapping familial clutter, and understanding that the pieces contained a presence of personal memory was satisfying. However, the moulds were too restricting and limited: the process did not materialise mourning, moving the grief forward, but preserved it, deadening the objects and failing to progress my research. 39 40 Fig 12, Memento Mori 2 (2013), 200mm x 200mm x40mm Acrylic Resin with Sellotape tin THE BEGINNING OF PAPER Paper, has many of the same properties of the torn polyester taffeta, except that it can be made from few beginnings. Materially, it relates to textiles in so far as many different fibres, including cotton, wool and other cellulose fibres with longer staple fibres such as hemp, different types of reeds and more can be made into paper.22 In the past, paper has been made into clothing, and clothing has been made into paper. Hand-made paper can be made by reusing recycled torn bits of discarded papers: this is a sustainable aspect of papermaking, one that is currently under-appreciated. Paper is made by the bonding of cellulose fibres, through atoms in air. 23 Ancient and traditional papermaking often involves reeds such as papyrus, and it’s the breaking down of kozo reeds that make the famous Japanese ‘washi’ paper. Paper is a fibre composite. The fibrous quality of paper materials became for me the most compelling of all textile qualities. The paradigm had shifted from tearing fabric, in the summer of 2013, to tearing paper, (Fig 4, Diagram to show paradigm shifts, page ). The Symbolic Potential of Paper Turney24 talks about knitting having ‘symbolic potential‘ within the Western prescription of the familial, the domestic, the hand-made, the traditional and the feminine, and calling it, ‘nostalgic longing’. In her essay ‘(S)Mother’s Love’, in the book Love Objects, the words ‘emanate[s] …from the symbolic potential of both activity and object as myth’25 in the context of contemporary knitting. When I wrote the words for ‘…and I will Always Love You’, 2012 (the embroidered woollen blanket dedicated to my mother, Fig 8), in the poem, (page 32), I wrote: ‘Objects can contain the memory of someone, and is a symbolism of their love.’ 22 Christina Leitner brings out the correlation between paper and textiles in Paper Textiles (London: A&C Black Publishers 2005), p.15 23 Katie Ryder and Nicholas Morley, ‘Pulp Fiction? Re-innovation of Paper Manufacture from Textiles’ (Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture, Vol. 10.no. 2, (2012), 238-247), p.240 24 Joanne Turney, The Culture of Knitting, (Berg: 2009), p.134 25 Joanne Turney in ‘(S)Mothers Love’, in Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture, ed. Anna Morannn and Sorcha O’Brien (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp.21-30 41 42 Fig 23, Hand-made sheet paper, rust What if paper could be a symbol of memory, longing and love; all the things that the object and the comfort of knitted wool can bring? In making paper by hand, memorabilia can be added to both ‘used’ paper and ‘new’ paper.26 In the Taoist religion, (mainly in China, South Korea and Singapore), its followers, like the Ancient Egyptians (although they used real objects and artefacts), burn paper money, tea sets, chairs, tables and all the paraphernalia the dead would need in the afterlife. The traditional rite of burning replicas of household objects continues today; however in the UK, many of the paper artefacts can be bought from specialist shops in the Chinatowns of major cities. In China, once the younger generation have given up making hand-made paper artefacts for their elders, where does that leave them with processing their grief in bereavement? There is a correlation between the physical process of a healthy mourning, and the mental aspects. How can they have the same healthy mourning without the physicality of making? This is borne out in an interview27 with a second-generation Chinese-born woman living and working in Singapore. She remembers that she was told that her grandparents created hand-made paper for mourning in China, but when her family emigrated to Singapore for work, and a new life, some eighty years ago; in crossing countries those traditions of hand-making paper stopped. The once three-dimensional hand-made objects are now flat, two-dimensional with the three-dimensional domestic objects, such as chairs and tables, tea sets, are printed on them. The younger generation have not been taught how to make paper in mourning rituals: instead they use printed papers, which are pretty - but they are not hand-made. Taoist Singapurians still fold the paper in a special, traditional way, but some do not know why they fold the paper into the different shapes. The folding of the paper is significant, as it is seals in the unsaid words, the words that are unwritten, that cannot be seen, or spoken, and of course a long time ago, many could not write, but it did not mean they could not feel.28 In the ‘ghost-burning ceremony’, traditionally held during the month of September in Singapore, some of the Chinese Singapurians do not teach their children the traditional Taoist rituals, as religious influences from Buddhism, together with environmental concerns, are changing the beliefs of the next generation. This traditional ghost-burning memorial to the dead, may become rare over the next twenty years. 26 ‘Used’ and ‘new’ paper is explained later on in this chapter 27 See interview on seperate memory stick 28 As indicated in conversation with Jonny Jiang, researcher in the RCA School of Design 43 44 Fig 30, Black substrate ready to be smoothed out through the grid In China, the paper artefacts of objects were ‘freshly’ hand-made after death by the bereaved relatives of the deceased. The reflection through making, materialising the artefacts, enables a healthy mourning of the dead, making sense of death for the bereaved, who are able to put their love and sorrow for their loss into the making. The Chinese were taught by their elders that if they made the artefacts ‘well’ by hand, the dead relatives would have a better afterlife. The bereaved relatives gain an outpouring of grief through their physical efforts. In the making of the physical and tangible aspects in paper, there is an achievement which is unseen in the materialised objects. There are many other invisible ‘makings’ involved, because they are intangible, unseen, they are not recognised as relevant and these nuances associated with bereavement and putting the dead to rest will be eventually forgotten. Separating the connection of the hand-made paper pieces and the bereaved from the process of making loses the connection of the symbolic ritual that the hand making of paper gives to the maker. The repetition of process allows for reflection on the deceased, making the unconscious conscious29 through the sifting of the substrate and the making itself. There is always time to make things, and this is what our next generations are forgetting. Making paper by hand in this context becomes symbolic in itself as a traditional ritual in mourning. Rosenberg writes on ‘making and unmaking of the material, symbolic and natural worlds’,30 about the lack of knowledge of the impact on the world our making has: a reason why there is a return to the impact of the physical, looking at craft and the artisanal through the eyes of a new generation. Whereas Eastern rituals centre on burning and fire, I was aware of the Judeo-Christian rituals of water and dissolution. The dissolution of paper fibres is the reverse of the divine act of God’s first act of separating solid from liquid matter in Genesis. The emergence of a body from immersion in water is a metaphor for a baptism, or ‘rebirth’, and these metaphors were certainly, if unconsciously, present in the satisfaction and pleasure I found in papermaking. 29 See Chapter 4 regarding Jung 30 Terence E. Rosenberg, ‘Intermingled Bodies: Distributed Agency in an Expanded Appreciation of Making’, From Akademisk, 6: 22013, (2013), 1-18 p.2 45 46 Fig 32, Domestic blender for making the paper into pulp THE EXPERIMENTATIONS Making Paper Initially my papermaking work involved paper which had been put through a Princess Pleater,31 a contraption with sixteen needles originally built for smocking. I may have used this pleater to conceal my rudimentary skills in papermaking. After a few experiments, I discarded the pleating process and persevered in the skill of making paper: the repetition of making and introducing new ideas into the substrate enabled me to further my research into the materialisation. Having not made new paper before by boiling and bashing plant reeds, my experimentation expanded into making new paper that augmented my skills in the hand and craft skill in this area, from basic to competent. I made both ‘new’ paper and ‘used’ paper. Making new paper helped me develop my papermaking skills: it especially helped in working to achieve the right weight. My first attempts in the making of paper were from shredded discarded paper; the consistency was not thin enough, so the first hand-made papers were raw in their own right, coarse and too thick. I used to boil the paper scraps, as the boiling removes the print from recycled paper. Having a short tutorial from master papermakers, Susan Cutts, from Chichester,32 and Professor Chika Ohgi from Nagoya University of Arts,33 set me on more considered paths. These masters are experienced in making ‘new’ paper. Without going to Japan and studying there, there is still much to be learnt about the classic Japanese art of papermaking. There is a consistency in making paper by hand: in order to heighten my skills, I became proficient at making new paper. Afterwards I was able to return to making used paper. 31 A Princess Pleater is a hand-making device that allows between 1 and 16 needles to be placed in the material and stitch at the same time. It was originally designed for smocking. See Glossary in Appendix. 32 Susan Cutts’ work is often fashion related, and has been collected by the Robert C. Williams Museum, Atlanta, GA, USA. 33 Chika Ohgi, http://chikaohgi.com/works.html 47 48 Fig 39, Grid ready to be taken off paper The fragility of paper was attractive, and the fragmentation of paper evident, especially when peeling off the absorbent dishcloths. The dishcloths were reused to soak up the excess water. Memorial significance can be created straight away from the original torn or shredded paper itself being remade, recreated, renewed. Fragments may be added into making paper right from the beginning, as the substance of the memory is made at the stage where the paper is shredded and pulped. Returning to making ‘used’ paper enabled me to explore making a variety of papers with introduced emotional content, making embodied meaning using a skilled method, with a framework and patina of the used, shredding bits of clothing, hair, thread, and photographs among other things. These shredded items can go into the mix, embodying memorabilia within the substrate itself. The paper becomes the ‘memento mori’ manifesting the materiality. I felt the same excitement of materialising hand-made paper as with the unknown outcome of the emerging photographic print from the chemical bath; papermaking gave me infinite possibilities of creating different outcomes. A basic papermaking recipe is as follows: Ingredients: A blender - any basic kitchen blender will do A shallow bowl to put the pulp in and large enough for a grid to be totally immersed in the pulp Water supply A stack of newspapers J – cloths Sponge A metal grid, mesh or deckle or anything that will let the water drain out: sometimes bamboo or wood is used. Method: There are many ways to make hand-made paper; this is only one of them. Take the paper you want to use and tear it into small bits. Put these bits into a blender. Add at least a ratio of 2/3 water to 1/3 paper bits. Blend the paper and water until all the paper is finely pulped. Throw the mixture into the shallow bowl. Once the shallow bowl is filled with pulp add a little more water to make 49 50 Fig 29 Bowl of residue water after the substrate has been used up the consistency of double cream. Then take the grid or deckle and scoop up a fine amount of substrate through the water, let the water drain out, then carefully but swiftly flip the deckle or grid on to a J-cloth or baking paper; squeeze off the pulp carefully with a J-cloth or sponge. The substrate should have come away cleanly from the grid. Cover the newly laid pulp with another cloth or sheet of baking paper, and repeat. Variations can be made to the recipe at the shallow bowl pulp stage where additional memorial paper or things such as ripped old photographs, petals or other memorabilia can be added. A large amount of water is needed to create the consistency of hand-made paper. Too little water and the paper comes out brittle and coarse: too much water and the paper becomes thin and fragile. Once the shredded paper is absorbed by the water and is well mixed with more water, it becomes a lighter, much thinner version of papier mâché. Adding more water to the mix makes the substrate into paper. In making flat sheets of paper, the mixture is collected on a flat mesh, or deckle which is then flipped off the grid and put out to dry. To absorb the large amount of water, I use cloth laid over a pile of stacked newspapers. The weight of hand-made paper with cloths in between lies on top of the newspapers. The layers of newspaper and wetness from the newly made sheets make it heavy with water. At this point it is useful to have a cloth to absorb the excess water that the process makes. There is a large amount of water at this stage of the procedure; in order to absorb, I put the J-cloth onto a stack of newspapers for all the water to soak up. After a sufficient amount of paper has been made the newspapers are saturated. I remove the stack of papers from the soaked papers and put on another dry pile to leave overnight. The saturated newspaper gets recycled or dries out for another papermaking session. I refresh the newspaper, so that the absorption is constant. This is my personal method, but it is not the only method – some practitioners leave their newly formed damp paper sheets to dry on windows, while traditional Washi paper is laid out on large pieces of wood in the sun. The domestic environment has been an important home and location for my research. The kitchen blender is used to make up old paper into something new. In making used paper, experiments have been carried out re-using anything around the home: egg cartons, packing paper, discarded paper, cards, tissue paper, paper from paper bags, paper covering bread, avocado packaging, 51 Storyboard to show papermaking process including Fig 31, Fig 30, Fig 29, FIg 23, Fig 20 52 domestic gift wrapping and cereal packets, fabric bits from my son’s worn clothes are examples that have been torn up and put into the blender. There are several connections between my work and the domestic sphere in the research. The kitchen as the first space of creativity in childhood, cooking and nurture. The home as the place which my child is most absent from me. The domestic noise and noise from children is silent. Seeing the toys left behind from my son, and living within that environment when he is not present, is the most painful of experiences. The place of touch and intimacy. The place of sleep and dream life. The space of emotional experience. Feminism. The personal is political. The space of the mother. The making is made in the same way as preparing food. The 15cm x 7cm recumbent figures made from paper clay made on wooden chopping blocks on the kitchen table, are being stored in food containers. The cake tins, plastic containers are kept in the place of food in the kitchen cupboards. The ‘recipes’ are made in relation to preparing food for making. The kitchen area is the studio. 53 54 Fig 46, Kitchen cloth absorbing the paper substrate THE PRESENTATIONS Presenting difficult subject research at conferences: During academic conferences, the reading of papers out aloud is normal for conference delivery. Sometimes my research material is sensitive to read aloud without a context for the delivery and it is not always possible to do so in a busy setting. Some members of a conference may be going through bereavement and dealing with their own personal grief. Considering the feelings of others in listening to discussing difficult subjects in the oral presentation, I set about devising a personal method for discussing painful issues. I consciously broke up the difficult writings by interjecting the method of reading from a hand-knitting pattern, which separated the content into smaller chunks of sadness: the matter would not be too distressing or overwhelming. This method of breaking up the sensitive thoughts into smaller chunks overlaid with facts, controlled the sensitivity of the subject matter defuses the sadness and pain, by reading small ‘makings’ from a knitting pattern. The hand-knitting patterns I read were an item that could be made and ‘completed’ within the academic paper, and were chosen as relevant to the discussion. For example, in one paper on the physical pain of grief through bereavement, I read about hand-knitting the back knitted pattern of the baby matinée jacket exhibited in Chichester Cathedral from I Never had the Chance (2012). In another academic paper, when discussing the death of a child, I read about the knitting of a premature baby’s cap.34 At the ‘ DDD11: 11th Death, Dying and Disposal’ international conference organised every two years by the Association for the Study of Death and Society, held at the Open University, Milton Keynes in September, 2013, I showed one of the photographs of the knitted pieces and presented, ‘Funeral Rites in the 21st Century dress in England: Cast Off’ and wrote this: “In bereavement, we are changed. The clocks cannot be turned back. Whatever the loss, it has happened and now we have to deal with the consequences. In the early part of bereavement, the acute pain felt by the bereaved can be akin to a physical pain. (Show the slide with black babies hand knit from ‘I Never had a Chance’ 2012) Knitting is supposed to still the mind according to Ann Hood (2008), ‘The Knitting Circle’. Avon ‘Let’s commence by knitting, take no 6 needles and cast on 85 stitches. The yarn is black – double knitting acrylic wool. Knit one, Purl one until the end of the row, turn and Purl one, Knit one. Continue this Moss stitch for six rows. ’35 34 The premature baby’s cap was knitted for a charity in Ireland. The pattern was knitted by an elderly cousin (now deceased), a retired nurse, given to me for my research by her son, when on a visit to Dublin in 2013. 35 Jules Findley, ‘Funeral Rites in the 21st Century dress in England: Cast Off’, at: 11th Death, 55 56 Fig 6, Edge of Grief I, II and III (2015), 2m x 2m handmade paper suspended by monofilament The technique of incorporating knitting patterns into the reading of my academic research was not used at all conferences, only ones where I thought there may be members of the conference who could be sensitive to grief. Although the reading could have been construed as performance, it was to help the taking in of such serious and potentially upsetting material with a relevant factual distraction, in a dual aspect of materialising grief. For the conference ‘Motherhood and Creative Practice’, at Southbank University, London, in June 2015, I presented ‘Edge of Motherhood’ and wrote: “The tissues in the box stare at you expectantly and the hormones in your body tell you that you’re pregnant and you must be happy. Worst of all you can feel your baby alive, kicking inside you. I knit as all expectant mothers do, I invite you to knit with me. This is a little cap for a premature baby 4-ply wool: Take up your no. 3-25mm (no. 10) knitting needles Cast on: 53 (61, 69) sts and work in moss st. for 6 rows. Row 7: * k 3, yfwd, k2 tog.* Repeat * to * until last 3 (6, 4) sts. K 3 (6, 4) sts. [Row 7 forms a row of eyelet holes, in case tubes need threading through in hospital.] How does a mother cope with not having the child she loves but also the double blow of being excluded from a group of new mothers to be she wants to be a part of? The pain of losing that baby is loaded with the pain that it may be the mother’s only chance of having a child.36” In the presentations, there is no link with ‘Les Tricoteuses’.37 This research is not about angry mothers, nor about voyeurism38 in the face of adversity. Dying and Disposal Conference, (Milton Keynes: Open University, September 5-8, 2013), p.3 36 Jules Findley, ‘Edge of Motherhood’, at Motherhood and Creative Practice, School of Arts and Creative Industries, Southbank University, London, June 1-2, 2015) 37 ‘Les Tricoteuses’ were market trader women who attended court trials of the nobles during the French Revolution. Due to the rowdy behavior of the female market traders, angered by the hunger of the political situation, they were banned from attending in the gallery, by the authoritarian, revolutionary government during the Reign of Terror (September 1793 – July 1794). As a result, many market tradeswomen paid for seats and sat near the guillotine in groups to watch the daily executions from 1788 onwards throughout the Revolution, whilst they chatted and knitted. They became known as ‘Les tricoteuses de la Guillotine’, (the Guillotine knitters). https://www.geriwalton.com/tricoteuse-knitting-women-of-the-guillotine/ [accessed 31 July, 2017] 45 See earlier, (page 31), on knitting at my mother’s bed when she was in hospital. 57 58 Fig 6, Edge of Grief I, II and III (2015), 2m x 2m handmade paper suspended by monofilament THE WORK IN PAPER Edge of Grief, 2015 Edge of Grief I, II and III (2015) came about from a successful application for the 2015 biennial, Why Would I Lie?’40 at the Royal College of Art, (Battersea). In creating the paper for the series Edge of Grief, decisions had to be made on making new or used hand-made paper, how to tear the paper into bits, and string the torn paper bits together. The aim of the installation was to watch the paper dance, as it moved with the air from the breath or the natural movement of people. Making this piece interrogated my research in terms of display, the boundaries of grief, and trying to establish measurement of something as subjective as emotions concerned with loss and bereavement. (Fig 6 Edge of Grief I, II and III). I decided to make new hand-made paper, dried and torn into small pieces. If I was remaking this installation again, my approach to making of the colours in the paper would be different. I would make the different shades in separate batches and not, as before, dyed in the wet substrate process, but at the shredding process. During the making of the paper and the cutting of holes in the aluminium strips, my mind was focused not just on making the piece, but also on why the piece was being made. This leads into what is the connection between artist, process and work produced: the questions ‘what is practice?’ ‘What is professional work/practice?’ And ‘what is research?’ Research has to take the form of going into the unknown with questions of thinking, making and producing new work. The research in itself is seeking new knowledge, to further knowledge in the world as well as one’s own world. Terence Rosenberg41 suggests that: ‘through making we constitute the way we are in the world and in making: ‘produces a surrogate’ of the body, which extends the body into the world, reforming the body and world and their relationship’. Elaine Scarry writes: ‘an altered surrogate of the body that resides in the material artefact.’42 Being blind to a subject of research, is cutting off an area of potential new knowledge. Until the material artefact is researched and produced, the knowledge remains unseen, unknown. On creating, Scarry writes: ‘the framing intentional relation between physical pain on the one hand and imagined objects on the other, a framing relation that as it enters the 40 Royal College of Art Why would I lie? (2015) http://lie.rca.ac.uk/ 41 Terence E. Rosenberg, ‘Intermingled Bodies: Distributed Agency in an Expanded Appreciation of Making’ From Akademisk (2013, Vol.6 Nr.22013, Art.4, 1-18), p.1 42 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p.280 59 Fig 6, Edge of Grief I, II and III (2015), 2m x 2m handmade paper suspended by monofilament visible world from the privacy of the human interior becomes work and its worked object.’39 The installations use the methodology of display; the arrangement is critical to ensure a successful exhibiton and display of the work in a way the artist wants it to be. To maintain the connection with the work from the making to the gaze, it is vital for the artist/researcher to handle their own material. Involvement with the aspect of display of the work allows the emotional connection from the artist to flow through from the artefact to the public gaze. 39 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p.281 60 Stacking up the papers to install on the grid, there were sufficient white for the front row of the grid, and moving towards the back, which comprised of all black paper, the three rows of the paper in the middle were in shades of grey of light to dark tones. The linear installations of Edge of Grief I & II were ‘degradé,’ rows of graduated colour tones from white to grey in I and from grey to black in II. The linear pieces were the easiest to mount up and pack up, slipping into the linear light fittings. Reflecting on the pieces in the series Edge of Grief I, II & III, the ‘visual vocabulary’43 is strong: it is the fragility in this work, which gives the series its strength and connection from the living, the emotional aspects of grief and bereavement. The pieces of paper became alive as they danced in the natural movement of air, and created their own life within the pieces. Yet the little pieces of torn edges were strong enough to be touched if desired. Edge of Grief III was more challenging: first I had to make the grid: as I wanted to have a ‘pre-installed’ piece,44 it became an experiment in installation techniques. When installed, each of the small pieces of hand-made paper moved slowly with the passing of air from the natural movement of people. As in The Curtain of Loss (2012), the Edge of Grief I, II and III (2015), had its own life and movement, this time on a smaller scale than in Chichester Cathedral. Scale is an important consideration for the installation to fit into the space. The decisions made are usually irretrievable once committed to the materials. Research in installations was carried out by visiting many contemporary London galleries, studying how contemporary artists, such as Cornelia Parker, among others, installed their work. Realising the attention to detail in her installation, the set-up had to be considered most carefully in order to make the installation successful. Edge of Grief I, II and III (2015), allowed me to explore the fragile torn paper and try out different methods of installation. The first to be manufactured were the linear pieces Edge of Grief I & II. These consisted of 11 holes in the aluminium strip, which held eleven strands of monofilament with four or five torn bits of paper sewn on to each monofilament. The grid piece, Edge of Grief III, would have to be hooked into the light fitting as were the others. The concern was 43 Frank Wilson, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture (New York: Pantheon Books,1998), p.145 44 I was trying to do as much work pre-installation so it would be easy to install on site 61 whether it would hang straight, suspended from one single hook. There was a possibility of the grid tipping if it was not equally weighted. Aluminium was selected as the material for the strips and grid, in preference to steel, as it was light, yet easy to drill clean holes into the runners. Constructing the series using the same quality of aluminium strip gave the series and installation consistency. Using a special drill tip, small holes were drilled to thread through the thin nylon monofilament. The aluminium rested on wood whilst holes were drilled into the metal and wood gave it a clean finish to the drilled hole. The monofilament was thin and tangled easily. In order to prevent knotting, each nylon monofilament was tied to a shiny, silver bead, which hung at the base of each thread. Once the paper had been threaded through, it was carefully folded up and packed in tissue paper. The steel fittings and hanging cables were an appropriate contemporary hanging system for the high ceilings in the Royal College of Art, Dyson Building. There were many little taped-up flat little packages in tissue. All ninety threads with paper were folded up and taped. At the private view, I tried to get a sense of public opinion to help me improve my work and was able to judge the reaction to the sensitivity of the pieces. One of twenty five feedback sheets from the raw data collected for Edge of Grief I, II and III gathered at the private view with informed consent.45 45 See Appendix p199, to view one example of twenty five feedback sheets from raw data on Edge of Grief 62 Paper Fragmentation and Absorption Paper and cloth absorb the smells and stains of our daily lives. A dry paper towel or a thin cloth can be used to absorb them, like mopping up. If it’s cloth it is squeezed out, reused and placed in such a way as to absorb more. If it’s paper, there is a point where no more water can be absorbed, it is saturated; it disperses or it disintegrates into soggy fragments. In daily life, are humans like that piece of dry paper? Do we as humans have a saturation point to absorbing daily spillages, and slowly, as we age, are we so saturated we don’t have the capacity of mopping up after people with the same efficiency, and like an old cloth, with age we are discarded? In our society, fragility that comes with age, is made invisible, and mute like mourning? Does coping with saturation and resilience in these daily occurrences make us who we are as individuals? Our spillages arrive in different quantities from each other; drying out in between mop-ups allows for more absorption. When babies are born they enter this world crying, yet tears are seldom mentioned in the cultural process of mourning. Crying is a fundamental early form of communication, and is a primal dynamic of the mother-infant interactional response; crying demands a response from a source of maternal comfort.46 Tom Lutz observes that in the context of contemporary approaches to upbringing, learning not to cry is a sign of socialisation and maturity.47 Crying at death, however, is a universal human condition. Repression of tears in gender or upbringing is associated with guilt and shame,48 as sometimes the tears flow without being able to be concealed. Baron-Cohen notes that empathy ‘triggers you to care how the other person feels and what they think,’49 describing it as a feminine trait, as women tend to have greater sensitivity to facial expressions and verbal nuances, as well as subtle nuances in character.50 Lutz writes about the weeping of Odysseus51 as indicating not what was being concealed but by what he did not want to reveal. Lutz discusses the rules of crying in public: that we can cry so long as we are appearing not to cry.52 The response to tears is made, but the pretence of not crying is upheld. The pain of trauma in death is numbed by crying, which recurs in memories years after loss or death. 61 Tom Lutz, Crying: the Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), p.162 47 Ibid., p.163 48 Michael L. Morgan, On Shame (New York: Routledge, 2008), p.35 49 Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference (London: Penguin 2012), Ch3, p.26 50 Ibid., Ch4 p.34 51 Tom Lutz, Crying: the Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), p.294 52 Ibid. 63 Fig 5 Hanging by a Thread ( 2015) part of the Fragmented Portrait Series, stitched unsized hand-made 64 paper, painted in watercolour Paper, and the making of paper absorbs all the tears and is born out of wet substrate. Most of us use paper tissues to absorb our tears when crying. Our reluctance to share and engage with the dialogue of bereavement is partly due to our cultural behaviour, which has evolved over time. Our attitudes to public displays of grief and affect in the West, were required to be moderated far earlier than the Victorian period. Plato in his Laws wrote ‘…I say that a man should refrain from excess either of laughter or tears, and should exhort his neighbour to do the same; he should veil his immoderate sorrow or joy, and seek to behave with propriety.’53 In considering emotions and affect, weeping can be devotional; my work is not devotional - the artwork sits within the contemporary art arena. Members of the public are affected by looking at my work, often they will respond positively as a result (See collected feedback from LOSS (2012), in the Appendix). My intention is that the artwork will reflect how the individual may feel; this might prompt people to discuss bereavement, or to reflect on their own grief issues. It was during this series of experiments that the fragmented portrait series developed. The Fragmented Portrait Series 2015 - 2018 The portrait, whether painted in life or at death, has significance; it is a permanent reminder of the person, and how they appeared at a particular time. Carol Mavor writes: ‘A photograph is a trace of the death of the moment held forevermore.’54 heightens the sensitivity that old photographs hold more poignant. In the Victorian era, when photography was becoming more common, photographs would be taken of the whole family and it became customary to take a photograph when children or adults died, as a reminder of the deceased for the rest of the family. Often they were heavily styled portraits: sometimes the portraits were taken with the eyes closed then painted afterwards; at other times, they were in family groups with siblings. The deceased children were sometimes propped up mechanically or held by one of the siblings or parents, usually their mother.55 53 Plato, Dialogues of Plato, Vol. 4, trans. with Analysis and Introduction by B.J. Jowet (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Book V, p.251 54 Carol Mavor, Black and Blue (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), p.68 55 ‘Death: a Self-portrait’ Richard Harris’s Collection, Wellcome Collection, London November 2012- February 2013 Wallace Collection, Death: A Picture Album (London: Arbiter Drucken, 2012), p.21 65 66 Fig 5, Hanging by a Thread ( 2015), part of the Fragmented Portrait Series, stitched unsized hand-made paper, painted in watercolour Stitching ‘new’56 white, A5 hand-made papers together gradually formed a larger sheet of paper, around A1 size, and this became a canvas. The paper was fragmented with the over-layering of sheets and stitching. Experimenting with applying watercolour paint to the paper, I devised a portrait that needed many layers of paint. The paint sank into the paper as the paper absorbed more and more paint due to the new paper that was made being unsized. Using the absorption became a means of developing the materialisation of my work. Fig 5, Hanging by a Thread Jules Findley, (2015) show in the Work in Progress show, Royal College of Art, Kensington, London 2016. Hanging by a Thread (Fig 5, page 66), was the first in a series entitled Fragmented Portraits using paint, or ash on hand-made paper. Once the painting was finished, the work took on other properties; the painting became impermanent, the work could fade. Being temporal made the identity in the picture seem as if it could gradually fade away, as we all will eventually. The gradual fading is the opposite effect to that sought by most painted or photographic portraits - the opposite of making something permanent and memorialised. Seamus McGuinness’s 2009 work on bereavement is described in his essay ‘ Lived Lives: Materialising Stories of Young Irish Suicide’57 McGuinness demonstrated, in a talk at the Royal College of Art in November 2016, how he archived donations of clothing from bereaved parents for private reflection, working with the grief of the bereaved parents of the young lives lost as they made the new artworks together. McGuinness recalled how the portrait became significant for each bereaved family as he materialised a black and white digital portrait of each young life in textiles. In the video McGuinness recorded revealing the portraits to the parents, each of these parents unconsciously touched the textile portrait in trying to make sense of the life lost; it was a sensitive and inspiring scene to watch.58 56 ‘New’ paper being made directly from the source of paper either reed or paper made from reed. ‘Used’ means making paper from paper that has already been in circulation, for instance packaging, wrapping paper, any type of paper that can be recycled. 57 Janis Jefferies, Diana Wood Conroy and Hazel Clark (eds.), The Handbook of Textile Culture (London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), Ch10, p.149 58 Talk at the Royal College of Art book launch by Janis Jefferies, Diana Wood Conroy and Hazel Clark (eds.), The Handbook of Textile Culture (London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2016) 67 Fig 27, Fragmented portrait sewn with brown sheet paper with ash weighted out to 21grams 68 In 2003, McGuinness made a visual representation in cloth of the most up-to-date statistics of young male suicides in Ireland, there were 110 deaths of young people aged 15 – 25 years: 92 males and 18 females. McGuinness’s made the installation called, 21 Grams59 which consisted of 92 white shirts collars, torn and the edges left frayed from a man’s classic shirt. Each shirt collar and fabric attached weighed the 21grams, and represented a male life lost who had taken their own life. The absence of the wearer in 21 Grams also indicated the absence of community and absence of human form represented in the fabric. The shirt collars hanging together revealing their frayed threads cut to the weight are evocative. They were placed at different heights, drawing the viewer’s gaze into the psychologically absorptive space and dialogue60. McGuinness went on to make effective research with parents who had lost a young person due to them taking their own lives, working with clinical scientist, Professor Kevin Malone at the Medical Research Committee, St Vincent’s Healthcare Group,61 in Dublin. McGuinness wanted to prove that the importance of familial tacit knowledge of those closest to the deceased is overlooked and their contribution could in some way affect the standard medicalised view of suicide. In death, the trivia often disappears: the humorous side of a persona, the shared jokes, the small memories, which are peculiar to the individual are often overlooked. When I made the acrylic resins (in 2013/14), I incorporated the personal items, the ‘clutter’, the personal remains of the deceased, into a commemorative acrylic memory containing these important, identifiable, but insignificant artefacts, normally thrown away after a person dies (Fig11, page 36). 59 In 1901, an American, Dr Donald MacDougall from Haverhill, Massachusetts, wanted to prove there was a difference in weight between a body weighed alive just before dying and a body weighed just after death. He made a study of weighing the body on a machine attached to the patient’s bed just before death and after death. Apparently, there was a difference in the two weights of ‘three fourths of an ounce’ or ‘between 19 and 21 grams’, which was taken to be the weight of the soul; his finding were published in 1907. Springing from MacDougall’s enthusiasm to prove that unaccounted-for body mass was the weight of the soul, the experiments on the six subjects who were elderly, four of whom died of tuberculosis, is research that is not to be trusted; a retrial of the experiment has never been made, however, the romantic idea that the soul could have weight remains. Ian Sample, ‘Is there Lightness After Death?’ Guardian, 19 February, 2004 https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2004/feb/19/science.science 60 Claire Bishop (Ed)., ‘Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art’ (London, Whitechapel, 2005), p.34 61 Medical Research Committee, St Vincent’s Healthcare Group https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/2-27/v1 69 70 Fig 25, Fragmented portrait sewn with black sheet paper with ash 21grams McGuinness62 uses the materiality of cloth, which was central to the connection and reconnection of the families, their bereavement - their mourning, recovering as lost parents. The surviving parents and families became co-producers, co-owners and co-curators of their experiences after death of their loved sons. With the parents’ permission, McGuinness materialised the portraits of their sons as symbolising absence, the present is the continuing lives of the parents but the past is their relationships with their children, their lives lost. Through the making and remaking of their children’s clothing and portraits, the parents come to terms with their loved son’s absence, accepting the disenfranchisement: through refabricating their presence, rather than trying to bury their past, they have made their past their present. This project developed in Ireland is significant - the knowledge found could be useful for bereavement organisations worldwide, which give support to parents suffering a bereavement in which young men or women have taken their own lives. According to the Samaritans63, UK statistics reveal that in 2014 there were 6,581 lives taken by suicide in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Of the 6,122 registered deaths by suicide in the UK, 16.8 % per 100,000 were men and 5.9% per 100,000 were women. On reviewing these figures from the Samaritans website,64 over the last year suicide rates have increased since 2014, especially in female suicide. 62 Janis Jefferies Wood Conroy, D; Clark, H., ‘The Handbook of Textile Culture’ (London, New York, Bloomsbury, 2016), Ch10 p.149 63 Samaritans, ‘About Us: our Research: Suicide: Facts and Figures’ http://www.samaritans.org/about-us/our-research/facts-and-figures-about-suicide 64 Ibid. 71 72 Fig 21, Hand-made sheet paper, pink THE MILK AND THE ASH After experimenting with making the first fragmented portrait using paint, I was intrigued by the idea of weighing out 21 grams in paper to see first of all what that amount looked like in small paper sheets, and whether it could be effective in the Fragmented Portrait series. Moving away from using pigment paint, I used ash as my material for paint from the burnings, as described below. It was during this series that I consciously endeavoured to make the paper in shades in skin-like colours as Pallaasma has suggested: ‘our skin is capable of distinguishing a number of colours; we actually do see by our skin’.65 In making this group of portraits, I found out, during the Second World War, artists used milk to size canvas, when artists’ supplies were short. First of all I used ordinary milk to size the paper, then I experimented with different types of milk, some of the papers were sized with baby formula milk and in others mothers’ own milk to give the paper a provenance and symbolic treatment, as you would in making an art object. In evaluating the idea of 21 grams for a series of my work, I felt it did not come together effectively as a separate installation of 21 grams as the work had for McGuinness. The series fitted well as the Fragmented Portrait series, in making paper like fragmented skin with all the bumps and knocks that skin can endure. I abandoned the 21 grams as a concept. It was from the techniques used in the Fragmented Portrait series that I was able to make a response to the 2017 Grenfell Tower tragedy, which lent itself to the medium and fragmentation. The Burnings Elementary ideas were explored by burning the paperwork from my earlier court cases, which was too sensitive to go in the recycling and too much to shred. There was something deeply satisfying watching all the paper work go up in smoke. Burning is not a new phenomenon in art: Cornelia Parker has used burnings in her work; however, the burnings I had in mind are taken more from the methods of cremation in Eastern funeral rituals: I used the matter, the paperwork from previous court cases, the dead matter; the negative matter that took my son away from me, in the court cases I did not want. The burning was filmed, and at the end left the most beautiful grey powdery ash. Next morning, still lying in fragments, the odd word or sentence was left, fragile, in the pile of ashes. Photographing the words the ash left behind after the fire 65 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, 3rd edn. (Chichester, John Wiley & Sons, 2012), p.12 73 Fig 20, Hand-made sheet paper, green with iron filings 74 was poignant. Once disturbed, the words disappeared into the powdery ash forever. Some of the words were captured in photographs. The ash was collected into bags: I added milk to the powdery ash to make it into a paste and used it to paint the second part of the fragmented portrait series that were 21grams in weight, already sized with milk. This time the paint did not sink into the paper as with the previous portrait, Hanging by a Thread; this was because the paper was sized with milk, and this time I used ash, not watercolour paint, which dried as a powdery sparkly paint on top of the surface of the sized paper. Paper like Skin An analogy for paper and absorption can be created by looking at hand-made paper as skin: permeable yet dripping with water. Dipping skin in water comes to mind: the drips from the water run everywhere, concave, without a towel to mop up, and dry out the skin. Skin is a strong yet fragile organ, subject to being torn, ripped, with raw edges in a similar way to the newly formed raw edges of paper. During the process of getting the paper mush on to a mesh grid or deckle (or anything that will let the water through), and transferring this on to the area selected for drying, sometimes bubbles can form under the wet leaves of potentially new hand-made paper. These bubbles are similar to blisters under the skin: convex, protruding and needing to be smoothed out at this stage of making, in order for the bubbles or blisters to be dispersed. Paper wrinkles and creases like older skin does when it is crumpled and squashed up. In frustration and anger hasn’t everyone screwed up a bit of paper into a tiny ball? In unwrapping the ball and smoothing out the paper, the paper retains the memory, like skin, and in some types of paper the texture changes when smoothed out. The paper surface sometimes changes into a velvety, skin-like texture. Our daily work absorbs the stresses and pain of what is happening in our lives. As mothers, we absorb all the cares of our children, our relatives, our families and then we, like paper need to dry out so we can reabsorb. There is a wide range of saturation points for humans, which makes us individual. Hand-made paper can be fragmented, possibly in a similar way to our lives. Paper is also similar to textiles - it can act like a fabric, in having properties that wick moisture like skin and either repel water or absorb moisture; there are many similarities between hand-made paper, cloth and human skin. 75 76 Fig 42, Pleated paper oiled using a Princess Pleater Didier Anzieu66 writes about the skin containing glands, secreting odours, sweat and nerves which control expressions. The skin preserves our inner environment, in form, texture, colouring, and retains the scars from ‘exogenous disturbances’. The skin and its surface is what everyone sees, and lets people know if it has been in battle.67 The musician and photographer Bryan Adams photographed the skin of the war-torn with their scars, burns, amputations: the colour of skin reflects whether we are well or ill. Once skin is damaged it affects our identity; could paper be taken up as identity? The skin is both permeable and impermeable and it is this quality that attracts me to the significance of paper, and whether it is able to absorb or not. ‘[The skin] is the oldest and the most sensitive of our organs, our first medium of communication, and our most efficient protector…’68 There are many paradoxes to paper, there is also its use for wrapping, which is another area to investigate, which could include the small clay figures as discussed in Chapter 3. The skin is strong and fragile: it has elastic properties and this special organ communicates with the outside world in its quality of texture, skin on skin, both painful and pleasurable in touch and sensitivity. In returning to grief, skin connotes our emotions, our feelings, our vulnerability and our fragility: our fragmentation. Anzieu cites Ashley Montagu, elaborating on the mammalian mother’s, tactile contact with her offspring, which functions both as ‘organic stimulation and social communication’.69 When a mother is deprived of skin to skin contact there is a part of social communication that is lost. In death, removed from the home environment to the hospital, it seems we have lost the intimacy of simple communication at the end of our lives. The work of Helen Keller (deaf-blind), who was able to communicate through the skin, has been overlooked. Sylvia Plath uses the theme of skin in her work seen in her writing here: ‘I felt the wall of my skin: I am I.’ 70 66 Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego [1995], trans. Naomi Segal (London: Karnac, 2006), p.18 67 Brian Adams, Wounded: The Legacy of War (Göttingen: Steidl, 2013), p.50 68 Juhani Pallaasma, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, 3rd edn.(Chichester, John Wiley & Sons, 2012), p.12 69 Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego [1995], trans. Naomi Segal (London: Karnac, 2006), p.19-20 cites Ashley Montagu, Touching: the human significance of the Skin 3rd edn. (New York: Harper Row Publishers, 1986) 70 Sylvia Plath writes about her American childhood, as she struggles with identity, and realisation of separateness after her brother was born. Ocean-1212-W completed in 1962, was commissioned by BBC Home Service for the programme Writers on Themselves broadcast in1964, after her death. Sylvia Plath,‘Ocean-1212-W’, in Writers on Themselves, (London: BBC, 1964) 77 78 Fig 38, Papermaking workshop The Workshops Over the course of my research, I have integrated my experimentation with paper into my teaching, in the module ‘Fibre Composites and Biomimicry’ at the University of Brighton, which I taught in 2016 and 2017. During the module there were several opportunities for the students to have a go at making hand-made paper on site. The students continued with their ideas and experimentation in their self-study time. In the dissemination and sharing of ‘praxis’ in action, through experimentation, the results have been imaginative and the students have taught me new techniques, furthering my own making. Knowledge is shared in a dual dialogue of researcher and student, which is rich and fulfilling. At the Design Research Society 201671 international conference held at the University of Brighton, my workshop was accepted as a practical session: most workshops were discussion-orientated. I was able to film some of this workshop in time-lapse72 video. From the positive feedback I received, the workshop could be reworked to include more discussion and used to gather further research into my field.73 More experimentation involved making paper from cutting up cotton rags, breaking the fibres down through boiling, simmering, adding water, before breaking down the substrate further with a blender. Blue hand-made paper was made from shredded denim, mixed with blue tissue paper and any other blue paper I could find lying around the house. Because the base paper was tissue paper the paper came out as quite fine, as did red paper from a similar base but then I added red card and other papers into that mix, which changed the substrate and subsequent finish. Pink paper was made during a student workshop as a student wanted to test the effect of Korean water-based paint with added glue. I wondered if with the added glue it would act like a size to the hand-made paper, and the paint would stay on the surface and not be subsumed into the paper like blotting paper as I had previously discovered through making Hanging by a Thread (2015). The glue did not work as a size on the pink paper. I used milk, however the pink paper was fragile and the milk too heavy for some of the batch, and the paper disintegrated. Louise Bourgeois had used reds, blues, purples, and pinks in her work throughout her life and particularly in her last series of work made in collaboration with the artist Tracey Emin. 71 Design Research Society see Glossary in Apprendix 72 See separate USB memory stick for videos. 73 See Appendix page 201 79 Brown paper was made from egg cartons and various bits of packaging in brown, envelopes, cardboard, wrapping from home-made bread, brown paper bags, it reminded me of domesticity, the products were all brown and found at home. Black paper was made from avocado packaging and tissue paper, packaging from perfumes, which of course gives black dark grey paper the colour traditionally associated with bereavement. Green paper was made from avocado packaging and the tissue paper left over from paper wrapped round to protect flowers. More recently I am combining the substrate colours into unusual mixes as it gives depth to the hand-made paper. 80 Fig 19, Fig 6 and Fig 14 Storyboard discussing the raw rdge 81 Fig 14, Without a Body (2015-2018), 15-18cm or 4 -6 inch bodies made out of paper clay 82 CHAPTER 3 FRAGMENTATION - SLEEPING BODIES In Spring 2014, I picked up a 5kg pack of clay, as I thought that making things over the summer holidays in clay with my then eleven-year-old son would be fun. The clay was paper clay, made from the stripping of hemp fibres at a processing plant. I was curious to use it to see what the results would be. The hemp plant has many different uses, and part of the by-product of the fibre can be used for building processes. It can be used with different binders to produce different types of materials. In this case I was going to use it without binders and let the clay air-dry to see how it reacted when it dried out. Subsequent to this, the fundamental maternal attachment bond between my son and myself was broken, on 8 June 2014; in the context of this loss, I started to make small 15cm bodies from the very same paper clay originally bought for play with my son over the summer. The iterative creative process in the repetition of the making gave me some form of sense of focus and order, which helped me to deal with and process the profound, intense emotions of living grief. In this trauma, through the work of Without a Body (2015), I discussed the living loss, of having the memory of a child without a body present. Through this experimentation process, I continually made, and still make, the small 15cm figures and by the time the Work-in-Progress show arrived in January 2015, at the Royal College of Art, (Kensington), I had just over a hundred figures to exhibit. Seventy-seven figures fitted on the table. (Fig 14). The clay is soft and easily pliable, when it dries it is fragile and the bodies can come apart or just disintegrate into powder. The figures are unfired so they are fragile, heads drop off or limbs fall apart from the main torsos and they do not transport very easily. The disintegration became part of the work: do we not all disintegrate when we die, and the flesh comes off our bones, and we become naturally apart from ourselves in death?1 Dust to dust, we reintegrate our remains into the earth. The small 15cm bodies behaved in that manner naturally, and become the dust, become the disintegration, become discarded, dispersing in structure returning to the earth, from where they were made and where as human remains we will go. The figures became an act of compulsion, rushing in from work and starting to make the figures, accumulating the number of days and nights that I had not seen my son. It was 563 days of anguish before I saw my son, under controlled conditions. Until this point, I had not discussed traumatic loss and complicated grief 1 Sally Mann, What Remains (Boston: Bulfinch Press 2003), p.2 83 Fig 14, Without a Body (2015-2018), 15-18cm or 4 -6 inch bodies made out of paper clay in my work. The figures are carefully wrapped up in blankets of kitchen paper towel, taking the place of food as they are stored in the cupboard of my kitchen, where they are placed in sandwich containers and cake tins, undisturbed, resting, sleeping until they are needed again. The theme of the death of a child in my work had arrived naturally, without me having to ‘force’ it or to ‘design’ a piece: it had come through art; this piece was located in art, as it was the art and hands that had spoken in making the piece. My work through the making of the figures has changed and moved on considerably; whether through personal experience or not, I had changed too, and was not the same person as I was before the summer of 2014. 84 Unknowingly and unplanned, like Bourgeois, Emin, Ishiuchi and Kollwitz,2 I had used autobiographical circumstances to make new art work. This was not art therapy, it was creating new outcomes out of traditional processes, but at the same time processing personal trauma. My practice research work was progressing - it was an extraordinarily creative time in a sea of grief and trauma where I felt alone, bereft without my son. Not able to hear his voice, see his face or expressions, hear his laughter, touch his skin, give and receive hugs, kiss my son good night and give him a hug in the morning or cook for him. The close relationship I had with the child in my son was forcibly over, severed. There was no parental empathy from the aligned parent or the courts; it was a violent, grievous act against the mother. The day my son was not returned to me, my personal loss became a living loss, where the object I loved was not dead but not with me. Bereaved in disenfranchised grief, the children in these cases suffer disordered mourning or disorganised grief, which falls into the category of ‘complicated grief’. My research on grief had involved me personally, horrifically, into something I could not have imagined or wanted: a living loss, a living grief. Emin discussed the grief of a mother with her work that arose from her two abortions: afterwards she made new work about being a mother.3 Mothers who lose their children through abortion, or death in the womb, whatever the state of fragility, (i.e. from very early beginnings), never forget their children, babies or foetuses, whatever the stage of loss. Although Emin has not had the experience of birth and bringing a child into adulthood, she is a mother as she has carried that child, though socially this would be denied to her, as there is no evidence of a live birth. If a child dies in the womb after twelve weeks, the mother has to give birth to that child and experience the grief and bereavement. Delivering a dead baby is unproductive, the emotional and physical effects (the next day mother’s milk still comes in) are a painful, awful reminder of her loss. The attachment of motherhood is still very much there, and the baby, even though dead is loved, particularly by the mother. How does a mother cope with not having the child she loves? There is the double blow of being excluded from a group of new mothers-to-be, or a group of mothers of children at school she wants to be a part of to share her 2 See Chapter 6 for discussion of these artists 3 See Chapter 6 85 Rempos Seque ~ Enis Qui Berciam 2017 Fig 14, Without a Body (2015-2018), 15-18cm or 4 -6 inch bodies made out of paper clay experiences of her child with other mothers. The pain of losing that baby or child is loaded with the painful awareness that it may be the mother’s only chance of having a child, or an only child. In spite of having no child to show for her pregnancy, I call her mother. 86 There are other emotions of blame, guilt, and shame that enter into the sadness of loss, particularly in maternal or child loss, because of modern hospital procedures, the public: ‘expresses the widespread belief that if there is a problem during a pregnancy, doctors will be able to fix it’.4 This belief is reinforced when people express shock when a baby is not carried to full term. When a child dies, mothers cope with their emotional journey to accept such a tragedy by forming an everlasting memory of a short life, whether it’s a young child, older child or young adult, together with a period of reflection. This period of reflection is necessary, as it is critical in any recuperation that the emotions felt are processed. By processing these emotions and rites that are personal to the family, the bereaved parents will help themselves accept the death of their baby. For many, it is as if time stands still for a while. For parents without a body to bury, their life stops, as it is difficult to move on without the presence of a body or remains to bring closure to a very difficult time. Motherhood naturally involves an emotional attachment to the child, even if it is prematurely severed. Love, separation and attachment form the key components of loss, bereavement and burial. How can memory be retained without losing the emotional connection to the objects that connect with a baby or child? In Rosenberg’s work,5 the empathy given in making and deconstruction creates the profound understanding of ‘unmaking’, intermingling in terms of ‘matter, things and environments’. If it is the touch of the object and intermingling of bodies that Rosenberg describes, it is this maternal touch and skin-to-skin feel of mother against infant that build on the attachment of a bond that is difficult to break, and dangerous to the infant if it comes unglued.6 May be, previous generations because of disease and uncertainty, were better prepared than our generation for maternal detachment when the time comes? Loss is a tension, loss is grief, sadness and the idea of loss, whether it has happened or not. Murray Parkes writes: ‘For most of us the fact that one day we shall lose the ones we love, and they us, draws us closer to them but remains a silent bell that wakes us in the night.’7 4 Linda L. Layne, Motherhood Lost: The Cultural Construction of Miscarriage and Stillbirth in America (Routledge, 2002), p.197 5 Terence E. Rosenberg, ‘Intermingled Bodies: Distributed Agency in an Expanded Appreciation of Making’ From Akademisk (2013, Vol.6 Nr.22013, Art.4, 1-18), p.3 6 Ibid. 7 Colin Murray Parkes, Love and Loss: The Roots of Complicated Grief (London: Routledge, 2009), p.167 87 88 Fig 15, Shame (2017), 20cm bodies made out of paper clay The death of a child or infant is not the only grief a mother has to deal with: it could be the realisation that your child has special needs, or a permanent disability - other unexpected griefs mothers have to face, such as mothering through domestic violence, or family bereavements, caring for other family members through sickness and disease; these are all losses under the umbrella of loss and being mothers. Roszika Parker writes: ‘our culture defends itself against the recognition of ambivalence originating in the mother by denigrating or idealising her.’8 Parker remarks that ambivalence is ‘normal, natural and eternal’,9 that despite change in women’s lives ‘the more ossified and stereotyped become dominant representations of ideal motherhood’,10 and this ideal influences women’s experiences of motherhood. Public Grief Objects and children’s toys become the focal point of the parents’ grief as they attach themselves to these objects that are connected to their children. Spontaneous memorials emerge when a local child is killed: friends and neighbours create a shrine with flowers, toys, with handwritten notes left by the road, or gate or post where the child died. In car accidents, sometimes the flowers are tied or nailed to a tree. Often small, soft toys are left by other children together with flowers by those who knew the child or family. These offerings are a contemporary memorial to a recent tragedy. The largest national spontaneous memorial and public outpouring of grief was the reaction to the tragic death of Princess Diana in August 1997, when a sea of flowers lay two metres high outside Kensington Palace. On the day of the funeral, the public were touched by the handwritten card saying, ‘Mummy’, that was placed on top of the flowers on her coffin, written by her younger son, Harry, who was twelve at the time. A smaller public outpouring of grief with toys, flowers and various shades of yellow hearts knitted and crocheted by members of the Women’s Institutes and others were left in and around the nearby churches after the Grenfell Tower disaster in June 2017. During the public disappearance of Madeleine McCann, in the early days of Maddie’s loss, her mother was shown always holding her daughter’s favourite toy, 8 Rozsika Parker, Torn in Two (Virago, 2005), p.19 9 Ibid., p.21 10 Ibid., p.22 89 ‘Cuddle Cat’.11 In death without a corpse there is no closure; it is more difficult for parents to shut down their child’s life. Bedrooms cannot be packed away, as there is the hope that one day that child may return, even into adulthood. Investigating the emotional effects of mourning and memoria from childbirth is a sensitive exploration in empathy, and with this is a journey of learning about grief, grief recuperation, and grief reparation, and if possible grief recovery from a maternal perspective. I put ‘grief’ in front of the ‘re’ words (recuperation, reparation), as there is no turning back to the person we were before the event. Bereavement changes us, our thinking, and our perceptions. There are many layers to bereavement. During May 2017, I spent a two-day residence In the Hole: Residency, on a prairie farm in Saskatoon, with Linda Duvall, a visual artist from Saskatoon and Toronto, Canada. Spending six hours each day with Linda Duvall in the hole, I reflected on my work; as I did so I was producing soil paintings using the soil from the hole and on the second day, using ash from burnings in reacting to the environment and conversation. On the second day we discussed the unresolved grief of the distraught mothers who had lost their children and the terrible destruction of child lives from the Child Migration Project. In September 2017, I was able to invite Linda Duvall to contribute to an online digital project. The digital project was called Conversation Overseas12 2017: it progressed the research in maternal loss and lasting grief from a living loss forward. I made small four-inch sculptures of a mother without her child, trying to describe the portrayal of absence, (Fig 17 ) whilst on a short visit to Singapore. I re-made them when I arrived home with the paper clay I was used to handling, called Absence 2017, (Fig16). Mavor talks about her mother with dementia who is still alive ‘but not of this world’: ‘to become unseen by a mother…, by one so loved, by one so previously known, by the person who taught us our first words, by the person we first spoke, ‘Mama’…..is to ‘descend into the untranslatable, to experience its shock without ever muffling, until everything Occidental.. in us totters’.13 These are similar feelings a mother feels when the child she loves has been taken away from her by force. 11 Paul Harper, ‘Cuddle Cat: What Was Madeleine McCann’s Cuddle Cat?’ The Sun (3 May 2017), available at: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3435619/madeleine-mccann-cuddle-cat-import- ant-kate-investigation/ [Accessed 30 December, 2017] 12 Digital Artist Residence (DAR), September 1-30, 2017, I invited Linda Duvall to join me in a digital conversation, Conversation Overseas, http://www.digitalartistresidency.org/artists/ jules-findley/ 13 Carol Mavor, Black and Blue (Durham, NC; and London: Duke University Press, 2012), p.18 90 Although starting a new life worked for many children in Canada, for others it was a programme in which they endured cruelty and abuse as well as unresolved loss and bewilderment from the mothers left behind, siblings and wider families. Clearly this loss is not just perceived by one generation, but is endured through another generation. In Skidmore’s account of her mother,14 complicated loss follows through generations: in her case, the loss of family from the original wrenching from her mother to her mother as mother and her daughter and new family. 14 Patricia Skidmore, Marjorie too Afraid to Cry: a Home Child Experience (Toronto: Dundurn Publications, 2013), p.56 91 92 Fig 17, Absence 1 (2017), 15cm bodies made out of white modelling clay CHAPTER 4 REVIEWING THE LITERATURE; GOOD GRIEF Psychoanalysis and Grief ‘Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paraoxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.’1 Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, was the first to write about the process of identification of the lost object in clinical examples of mourning. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’2 Freud identified the difference between normal and pathological mourning. ‘Melancholia …is marked by a determinant which is absent in normal mourning or which, if it is present, transforms the latter into pathological mourning. The loss of a love-object is an excellent opportunity for the ambivalence.’3 Mourning, or trauer in German, means ‘grief’. ‘Grief’ originates from the thirteenth-century French grever meaning ‘to burden’, sorrow being thought as ‘weighty’, derived from the original Latin word gravis, meaning ‘heavy’. The word ‘trauma’ also means ‘wound’. In discussing bereavement and grief, Freud comments that in deep mourning the reaction of the bereaved, ‘contains the same painful frame of mind, the same loss of interest in the outside world…loss of capacity to adopt any new object of love (which would mean replacing him)’4 in relation to the one mourned. Affects and emotions are discharge,5 and the resulting feelings are the final manifestation. Mourning is ‘work’ and in ‘the work of mourning’ absorbs all of the self.6 Does the ‘work of mourning‘, in its various stages, have similarities with some of the processes that occur in the work of art? Bereaved relatives have to undergo a process of ‘reality testing’ in every aspect of their lives to confirm the new reality. The energy invested in that relationship is redistributed in the ego and identity. As part of the onset of reality testing, 1 Colin Murray Parkes and Holly Prigerson Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life (London: Penguin, 2010), p.49 2 Sigmund Freud On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis – Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id and other Works’volume 11(1957) (London: Penguin, 1984 ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) p.247-268 originally written in Freud’s native German, ‘Trauer und Melancholie’ [1917] 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., p.252 5 Ibid., p.260 6 Ibid., p.254 93 Fig 14, Fig 17 Storyboard of lost bodies 94 Fig 40, Burnings of paper to make ash Bowlby observes that the soon to be bereaved decathects from the near dying,7 this new reality will be without the beloved person in their lives. The redistribution of energies changes the homeostasis of strengths within the self, and this can be tiring. If the work is avoided, then a manic denial can take the place of mourning. The dramatic qualities of manic activity can seem extravagantly energetic, but this is usually a mask for the absence of mourning and sadness.8 7 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss: Volume 3 Loss: Sadness and Depression [1980] (London: Random House Group Ltd Pimlico 1998), p.29 8 Sigmund Freud On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis – Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id and other Works volume 11 [1957] (London: Penguin, 1984 ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ [1917], p.266 95 There is a relationship with cloth, the object: not the lost object but the living object, what is left behind, through memories and mourning. It was not memory or objects left behind that attracted me to this research; it was the absence of dialogue around death and its processes. Understanding that the living decathect from the dying, and the dying as they let go, gave me a better comprehension of the psychological aspects of mourning, and the grief processes that realise the ‘left behind’ objects, or the residues of someone’s life, their existence. The pain cannot be seen in the bereaved, and the initial stages of bereavement align themselves to mental illness. Freud identified pain in bereavement seeing bereavement as ‘painful’: if the development of the affect was suppressed, it becomes melancholic and ‘is the true aim of repression.’9 Freud’s early work has been challenged: Woodward10 proposes there is an in-between state between mourning and melancholia; the person is still in mourning but has moved on from the ‘self’ being all-consumed by mourning. Freud believed that melancholia includes self-loathing, guilt and the internalisation of the lost object, resulting in loss of self-esteem. The rage at ‘self’ is thought of as melancholic. C.S.Lewis, in his emotional discourse, explores the range of emotions he feels about his guilt: ‘the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it – that disgusts me.’11 Bowlby considers that emotions such as guilt, self-loathing and anger are part of a healthy mourning.12 I chose Freud as a theorist for my research as he wrote about Mourning and Melancholia in his short essay and was the father of psychoanalysis, from that it initiated my thinking on bereavement as well as cathexis. I chose Bowlby as he his empirical work on attachment especially the little talked about idea of the natural process of decathecting at the onset of death, helped my research questioning on the process of loss. In a living loss it is impossible to decathect as there is no body. 9 Ibid., p.252 10 Karen Woodward ‘Freud and Barthes: Theorising Mourning, Sustaining Grief’ Discourse (1990 13: 93-110) (1990 23: p.96) 11 Clive. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber 1961), p.6 12 John Bowlby The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds [1979](Routledge Classics London, New York 2005), p.102 and p.65 96 Fig 33, Ash from the burnings Freud’s account of ‘Trauerarbeit’, can be translated literally as ‘grief work’ in which the bereaved have to work through some painful emotions and stages. Both Bowlby and Lindemann13 recognised grief work and incorporated it into their own clinical practice. Bowlby’s seminal research became recognised as part of Attachment Theory. Stroebe14 examined grief work in terms of a ‘blueprint 13 Erich Lindemann, ‘Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief’ American Journal of Psychiatry, (1944) 101 pp 141-148 (1979), p.234 14 Margaret Stroebe ‘Coping with Bereavement: A Review of the Grief Worth Hypothesis’ OMEGA ‘The Journal of Death and Dying’ (1993 Vol 26, Issue 1 pp 19 - 42), p.19-20 97 for coping’, confronting bereavement, coming to terms with loss and avoiding detrimental health consequences, taking the view that suppressing reality is a ‘pathological phenomenon’15 Bowlby discusses bereavement stages as phases.16The first phase, numbness, lasts for a very short time period,17 the anger generated manifesting itself in an effort to bring that person back - this can last 18 a few hours or days; the second phase is a phase of yearning, searching for the lost figure, lasting some months, even years; the third phase is of disorganisation and despair, and the last phase is the realisation of the greater loss and re-organisation. Once the bereaved accepts that the lost person is not returning, acceptance can be made by the bereaved to admit defeat, and a re-emergence into the world can be made, ‘like a cloud lifting the heart and mind eventually’,19 as realised by Lewis. Kübler-Ross20 described her phases of delivering bad news to the near-deceased as stages of denial, anger (Why me?), bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. The acronym for the Kübler-Ross stages of death is DABDA;21 however, these stages were not meant to be linear. Some of these emotional states, notably anger, are present in both parties, both recipient of death, and the soon-to-be-bereaved. Bowlby believed the adult’s initial response to loss, with the emotions associated with anger and protest, is a similar response to a child’s loss of an object. This loss of relationship to the attached object, to a child, is a tragedy. In Bowlby’s research into anger, he found that adults protest against the loss in anger, in reproach, wanting that person to return and be reprimanded, especially when the loss is that of a child.22 Although Kübler-Ross’s work did not resonate with my research question, like Bowlby’s research, her stages of death are well known and needed to be mentioned. 15 Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, ‘The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement: Rationale and Description’, Death Studies, 23:3 (April-May1999), 197 – 224 (p.199) available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/074811899201046 [accessed 25 October 2017] 16 John Bowlby, ‘The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds’ (1979) (Routledge Classics London, New York 2005), p.101 17 Ibid., p.69 18 John Bowlby, Processes of Mourning: ‘International Journal of Psychoanalysis’ (1961) (42: 317-340), p.330 19 Clive S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber 1961), p.55 20 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, On Death and Dying: What the Dying have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and their own Families (London: Routledge, 2008), p ix 21 Ibid.: For DABDA, Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance, see Glossary in Appendix 22 John Bowlby thinks this anger is a primate urge from evolution and research, which was carried out and evidenced in other species such as primates. John Bowlby, Processes of Mourning: ‘International Journal of Psychoanalysis’ (1961) (42: 317-340), p.330 98 Grief and loss are not necessarily confined to the experience of death and bereavement, but happen at different times in our lives. As a child, a school friend moving away or moving house can be devastating; anything involving the loss of an object of love, such as a favourite teddy or toy, can be a disaster. Adults face difficult losses; loss of the opportunity of having children; loss of a love; loss of a job, or a house move; refugees experience loss of home or country, family and friends. Incapacitating illness; loss of limbs; loss of expectation or loss of a friendship can all pull at emotions, and grief is experienced as a result. Autobiographical Accounts of Grief and Phenomenology In A Grief Observed, Lewis23 describes the anger he feels alongside the pain of his major bereavement in a profound and human way after his wife died of cancer. He feels different emotions: ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear’24 a powerful opening first line; he continues to describe the roller coaster of emotions that is the impact of a major bereavement. In a similar way, Ironside25 discusses in graphic detail the physical symptoms of bereavement. Lewis and Ironside are both surprised at being unprepared for the enormity of the affect and pain. Lewis talks about his dead wife in terms of ‘otherness’ as ‘the rough, sharp tang of her otherness is gone’.26 Lewis would have been aware of Jung’s work on the unconscious, and Lewis writes: ‘…there is a terrible thing called consciousness. Why did it produce things like us who can see it and, on seeing it, recoil in loathing?’27 Jung writes about ‘the other’ as our personal shadow, the darker side of ourselves our ‘personal unconscious’28. Freud observes our shadow as ‘the repressed’. Jung’s opinion of our ‘otherness’ is that it is inferior. Jung tried to bring an awareness to the shadow and remove its destructive or repressed purpose releasing it through psychoanalysis. Although Jung’s ideas differed from Freud about consciousness and what was repressed, I chose to include Jung as his seminal work on consciousness and otherness answered my research questions through examining unconscious thought and the use of repetition in my methodolgy. 23 Clive S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber 1961), p.17 24 Ibid., p.5; p.29 25 Virginia Ironside, ‘You’ll Get Over It: The Rage of Bereavement’ (London Penguin, London 1996), p.7 26 Clive S. Lewis, ‘A Grief Observed’ (London: Faber 1961), p.18 27 Ibid., p.25 28 Carl Jung, The Architypes and the Collective Unconscious (1959) (Collective Works of Carl G. Jung, Routledge, Volume 9 part 1, 2nd Edition 1991), p.76 99 Researching into these physically painful emotions, I endeavoured to connote the intensity of early bereavement recorded by Lewis in my practice. In the early part of my research,29 I studied anger and rage, as well as the physical pain that is present in grief. Once bereaved, the self is changed. There is an argument which suggests that there is never a full recovery to where the self was before, when the loved one was alive. The experience of what it was like to live our lives with that loved one before death cannot be revisited. Apart from anger in bereavement, the intense pain and grief can be overwhelming. The reality is that there is now an understanding of the pain and profundity of death. The brain is a muscle; it pulls 29 Fig *** Jules Findley ‘Pain’ (Work in Progress January 2013) 100 Fig 33, Ash from the burnings Fig 33, Ash Once bereaved, the self is changed. There is an argument which suggests that there is never a full recovery to where the self was before, when the loved one was alive. The experience of what it was like to live our lives with that loved one before death cannot be revisited. Apart from anger in bereavement, the intense pain and grief can be overwhelming. The reality is that there is now an understanding of the pain and profundity of death. The brain is a muscle; it pulls back the memory of painful emotions we have felt before in our grief for others. Sometimes bereavement can be bleak for the people are left who live on, as they have to continue in their everyday life, when their loved ones have gone, and they are left behind to try to make sense of mourning.30 Lewis is desperate to find some rationale; he writes the same word repeatedly, ‘Feelings, and feelings, and feelings’31 like a spiral of agony, having already repeatedly written, ‘Cancer, and cancer, and cancer’32 as if the repetition of the word could help him understand this terrible disease, at the time Lewis was writing the word ‘cancer’ meant a prolonged suffering, then death. The repetition of the words by Lewis resonate with the repeating processes in practice, regaining a rhythm of motion and peace in an endeavour to still the mind. Lewis writes ‘For in grief nothing ‘stays put’. One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. ‘Round and round’, everything repeats.33Lewis writes on pain: ‘the physical pain can be absolutely continuous.’34 I considered the work of both Lewis and Ironside who write from an emotional, autobiographical, subjective viewpoint. Ironside, more contemporary than Lewis discusses anger as ‘rage’ in her emotional autobiographical writing about being bereaved of her father, she writes about the ‘white rage of anger…bubbles beneath the surface long after the funeral’35 as an energy that is unchannelled frustration. Lewis, probably one of the first to articulate the emotional response to bereavement and is still considered as valuable today. Both helped me articulate my own ideas of grief and bereavement, describing the raw emotions felt in the early stages of loss, helped me frame the emotional aspects of my research questions. 30 Clive S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber 1961), p.33, 31 Ibid., p.32 32 Ibid., p.12 33 Ibid., p.49 34 Ibid., p.35 35 Virginia Ironside, You’ll Get Over It: The Rage of Bereavement (London Penguin, London (1996), p.6 101 102 Fig 34, Figure wrapped in paper towelling Disenfranchised Grief An Index for Complicated Grief (ICG),37 has been superseded by the Prolonged Grief Index (PGI), which incorporates Prolonged Grief Disorder and comprises of 13 items (PG-13) that identify a heightened risk of the bereaved of being susceptible to stress and dysfunction. The research supported the inclusion of PGD in DSM-538 as a recognised mental disorder. Post Traumatic Grief Disorders, PTGD39, are only recently being recognised as a mental illness affected by many different types of traumas. Loss and bereavement through trauma is just one example. Doka40 writes on disenfranchised grief, as well as many forms of grief from different perspectives, particularly children’s grief. There are academic studies of complicated grief from soldiers who have experienced action in war.41 People can suffer terribly with disenfranchised grief, as often they cannot talk about it even to friends. These people suffer in silence, which is deafening in its quietness and as a result is isolating and lonely. Their mourning is in isolation, as it is not only the loss of a relationship but also the loss of a social community as a result. Other emotions that surround disenfranchised grief are guilt, shame, anger, fear, anxiety, all of which highlight the pain and the very difficult situation people can find themselves in. This type of grief cannot readily be expressed by sufferers: it is suppressed and as discussed earlier the grief, being repressed, can become melancholic.42 Help and understanding is not always available, and friends may not be able to empathise, as they may not know what the situation is, or may even spurn the bereaved, if circumstances dictate. Grief can linger and take a lifetime to dissipate. 37 Prigerson, H. G., Maciejewski, P. K., Reynolds, C. F. III, Bierhals, A. J., Newsom, J. T., Fasiczka, A., Frank, E., Doman, J., & Miller, M. ‘The inventory of Complicated Grief: a scale to Measure Maladaptive Symptoms of Loss. Psychiatry Research, 59(1-2) (1995), 65-79 38 See explanation of DSM-5 and Glossary in Appendix 39 See Glossary in Appendix 40 Kenneth J. Doka (ed.), Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, Challenges and Strategies (Champaign IL. Research Press Publishers, 2001), and Kenneth J. Doka (ed.), Disenfranchised Grief: Recognising hidden Sorrow (Lexington MA. Lexington Press 1989) 41 M. Lewis, Grief, Trauma and Combat (s.1.:The Forum, 2006) 42 Sigmund Freud on the pathological (page 47), and the readings of Stroebe and Henk (2010), see bibliography. 103 Storyboard of ash and fragments Smith cites Elaine Scarry on the similarities of emotional and physical pain, ‘Emotional pain can sometimes be so severe that it approaches the kinds of features that come about in physical pain…people can understand the external object in the world that has been lost – the child or the lover or the spouse’36 alluding to when there is no body but grief, then there is also pain, but it is unseen. Time makes the memory of the pain subside, and by then it is a relief: as the pain is all too exhausting, too memorable, too raw and too deep in the early weeks or months. 36 Elizabeth Smith, ‘The Body in Pain: An Interview with Elaine Scarry Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 32.2 (September 2006), pp.223-37 http://www.concentric-literature.url.tw/issues/Who%20Speaks%20for%20the%20Human%20 Today/10.pdf [accessed 18 April, 2017] (p.225), cites Elaine Scarry The Body in Pain (1985) 104 In disenfranchised grief, the pain is invisible; it is a pain people carry with them possibly all of their lives. ‘Professionals’: social workers, courts, do not see the pain of emotional abuse, or coercive domestic violence. How can these bereaved be heard or supported through their unseen, unrecognised bereavement? It is also why sympathy for unrecognised, unseen bereavement and mental illness is harder to give, and carries through to the workplace. Embodied in disenfranchised grief is shame. Shame brings ‘shabbiness’ to the bereaved, as shame is an emotion that is usually hidden and cannot be talked about openly, ‘the free libido was not displaced onto another object; it was withdrawn into the ego, (where) it served to establish and identification with the abandoned object. Thus the shadow fell upon the ego’ writes Freud.43 He suggests that ‘shabbiness’, and depression is how the mourner feels, impoverished by the loss of love. Mourning rites in the Jewish religion for example, often involve tearing clothes (separation), there is the notion of self-harm (pain), burning (anger), burial (forgetting), the wearing of black (loss of liveliness/colour). The natural thing to do with shame is to bury it, and this buried shame inevitably surfaces through the shiny veneer exhibited to society. Defences against shame include denial (not facing facts): hiding the truth of the situation or event. The emotions of anger and repression surface in the least likely of places and scenarios. The ‘shabbiness’ of mourning in the context of shame leaves emotions raw and unresolved, like tattered paper, the edges of which will never be finished off. In the loss of a child, the trauma of this tragedy embodies the loss of hope, loss of innocence, loss of the vulnerable, loss of parents’ dreams of the future with that child, and the loss of potential for their future grandchildren and success in that child. Arnold and Gemma write on parental grief: ‘Parental grief is boundless. It touches every aspect of [a] parent’s being...When a baby dies, parents grieve for the rest of their lives. Their grief becomes part of them...As time passes, parents come to appreciate that grief is [their] link to the child, [their] grief keeps [them] connected to the child.’44 43 Sigmund Freud On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis – Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id and other Works volume 11 [1957] (London: Penguin, 1984, [1957, 1917]) ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ p.249 44 Joan Arnold and Penelope Buschman Gemma, A Child Dies: A Portrait of Family Grief. (Philadelphia, PA: The Charles Press Publishers. 1994, Second Edition), pp.50-51 105 106 Fig 16, Absence (2017), 15cm body made out of paper clay Arnold, Gemma and Freud recognise that for the bereaved to move on is to forget about their loved one, and the pain is part of remembering: therefore the pain, as in disenfranchised grief, chronic grief or prolonged grief disorder, can last forever. Those concerned with this type of grief do not want to forget about their loved ones: they become stuck in their grief, living with bereavement. Kristeva discusses the depressive person in the context of the mourned ‘Object’ and mourned ‘Thing’. The ‘classic’ psychoanalytic theorists Abraham, Freud and Klein believed that ‘depression, like mourning, conceals an aggressiveness towards the lost object… revealing the ambivalence of the depressed person with respect to the object of mourning.’45 Self-loathing and hatred of self and other, was described aptly by Kristeva: ‘I love that object, but even more so I hate it; because I love it and in order not to lose it, I imbed it in myself; but because I hate it, that other within myself is a bad self, I am bad, I am non-existent.’46 Kristeva agrees that ‘depression like mourning conceals an aggressiveness toward the lost object,’ 47 revealing the ambivalence of the depressed person in the context of mourning, in wanting to swap places with the person that is dying is part of letting that person go and accepting the person will die.48 Kate Bush writes in her lyrics for ‘Running up that Hill’ (1985), ‘..It’s you and me And if I only could I’d make a deal with God And I’d get him to swap our places…’49 In death, Freud believed that the self ‘splits’ in confronting loss and bereavement. He wrote about the lost object meaning that a relationship ‘cathexis’, is lost in the ego. Does the self ‘split’ in dying, as well? Melanie Klein’s idea of splitting, as moving backwards and forwards from a depressive to more paranoid, schizoid position50 is described by Kristeva. She distinguishes ‘binary splitting’, ‘the distinction between ‘good object’ and ‘bad object’ insuring the unity of self’, and a ‘parcellary splitting’, which affects 45 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, [1941] (New York, Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1989), p.11 46 Ibid. 47 Kelly Oliver, Ed. ‘The Portable Kristeva’ (New York, Chichester West Sussex, Columbia University Press, 1997), p.165 48 Reference to Chapter 2 ‘The Importance of the Hand’ Letting go 49 Kate Bush, ‘Running Up that Hill’ in Hounds of Love[CD] (1985) 50 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia [1941] (New York, Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1989), p.17 107 108 Fig 14, Without a Body (2015-2018), 15-18cm or 4 -6 inch bodies made out of paper clay Fig 38, Papermaking workshop the object and damages the psyche itself, which literally ‘falls into pieces’51. Kristeva writes in relation to the depressed, of separating ‘the signifier from the referent’52. In narcissism, it is the splitting that maintains the omnipotence as well as the destructiveness and the anguish of obliteration. Kristeva uses language to convey the meaning of affect as the symbolic, and whatever is contained in such a vessel of loss is symbolic - the rest is semiotic 51 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1941) (New York, Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1989), p.19 52 Ibid., p.26 109 She writes about the ‘loss of the mother as a biological and psychic necessity.’53 In her writing about the abject, and breaking away from the ‘maternal entity’,54 Kristeva suggests that the child must make the mother abject so that a separation is initiated from mother and child, and states that the child’s identity cannot form properly without this separation. I chose Kristeva as a theorist in my research as her work is accessible and her ideas on depression and mourning evolve from a feminine perspective. Her work on maternal and abject are relevant to my research. Her work on the symbolic helps me to answer my research questions on maternal loss together with the symbolic in paper and address complicated grief and psychological constructs of ‘splitting’. Kristeva has other feminist ideas which do not answer this research question, but are useful for future consideration in loss and grief. The body remembers trauma, especially in complicated grief. Bessel Van der Kolk55 runs a trauma centre56 in the United States. Van der Kolk researches, trains and educates about trauma. Levine57 also investigates trauma and memory. In my experience, the residue of the trauma through physical memory clenches my stomach and now I am prone to vomiting when I feel anxious. Medicalisation of Grief The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (known as DSM)58 is a manual of categorising mental health issues used by the United States, Canada, Australia and Great Britain, listing conditions such as bereavement and depression among other mental disorders that can be medicalised with prescription drugs. The current issue being used is the fifth, and is referred to in the medical arena as DSM-V or DSM-5. Since 1954, attitudes to bereavement have changed with each issue of the DSM. From 1909, the idea that time heals bereavement so long as the mourning ‘work’ is achieved was the status quo until 1954, the time DSM was brought into operation, when bereavement issues were still being considered as part of a depressive disorder. 53 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1941) (New York, Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1989), p.27 54 Ibid., p.13 55 Bessel Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps Score: Mind, Brain and Body in Transformation of Trauma (London: Penguin 2015) p.76 56 Bessel Van der Kolk Trauma Center, Brookline M.A. USA http://www.traumacenter.org/about/ about_landing.php 57 Peter A. Levine, Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a search for the Living Past Berkley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2015), p.125 58 American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edn., (Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013), See Glossary in Appendix for a full list of acronyms 110 DSM-IV stated anyone recently bereaved could be diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD)59 two months after the loss. Prior to that, DSM- III, had stated this could be one year after a loss. DSM-5 (released in 2013), has reduced the prescribed time frame down from two months to two weeks, ‘further pathologising the authentic human experience of sorrow.’60 Joanne Cacciatore describes this change as ‘bereavement exclusion’. The recently bereaved at the discretion of a psychiatrist, social worker, or psychologist can be categorised as mentally ill, as soon as two weeks after the death of a loved one. Supporters for DSM-5 argue that it enables mourners to access mental health care for grief. As grief can turn into depression, the depressed need mental health care, and insurance companies can provide cover for depression. In 2012, an editorial article on the bereaved was published in The Lancet, saying: ‘Grief is not an illness; it is more usefully thought of as part of being human and a normal response to death of a loved one. Putting a timeframe on grief is inappropriate…most people who experience death of someone they love do not need treatment by a psychiatrist or indeed by any doctor. For those who are grieving doctors would do better to offer time, compassion, remembrance, and empathy, than pills.61 I chose to discuss Cacciatore’s ideas on medicalisation and changes to DSM as these are important considerations to giref and bereavement, and were relevant in terms of answering elements of my research questions. Grief and bereavement have been tied into the DSM since its existence. Both The Lancet and Cacciatore say we cannot medicalise grief either ethically or morally. To do that is to ‘medicalise love’62. Freud recognised that medication in grief was not necessarily needed, just time and kindness:‘although mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment. We rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time, and we look upon any interference with it as useless or even harmful’63 59 See Glossary in Appendix 60 Dr. Joanne Cacciatore, a researcher at Arizona State University (and a bereaved mother), mentions in her blog of March 1st 2012, the changes for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5 (DSM-5). (2012 March 1); http://drjoanne.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/open-letter-regarding-dsm-5.html; http://drjoanne.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/relativity-applies-to-physics-not.html; http://drjoanne. blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/ 61 The Lancet, 379:9816 (18 February 2012), p.589 62 Jules Findley, ‘Funeral Rites in the 21st Century dress in England: Cast Off’, at: 11th Death, Dying and Disposal Conference, (Milton Keynes: Open University, September 5-8, 2013) p.3 63 Sigmund Freud On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis – Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id and other Works volume 11 [1957] (London: Penguin, 1984) ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ [1917] p.258 111 112 Fig 22, Hand-made sheet paper, black Bereaved parents are 30 times more at risk of suicide than the average parent: having made considerable research into suicide in a study in Denmark, in the first month of parents’ loss of a child, Pin Qin and Mortensen, in their study ‘The Impact of Parental Status on the Risk of Completed Suicide’, recorded that ‘losing a child may contribute more than other factors to provoke parents to want to die.’64 It would seem that compassion and empathy are much needed in our society, to help parents who have lost a child and recently bereaved adults. Socially, it is still considered a sign of weakness when adults reveal their true feelings about death and bereavement, admission to feelings of guilt, self-loathing and anger, this is often due to ignorance of what are considered normal emotions associated with bereavement. 64 Ping Qin and P.B. Mortenson, ‘The Impact of Parental Status on the Risk of Completed Suicide’ Archives in General Psychiatry 60 (2003), 797-802 p.802 113 Fig 30, Fig 36, Fig 6 Storyboard to show materials 114 Storyboard to show bodies 115 2010 – 2012 preparation 2014 2016 Nov 2017, Being for Jan 2014, WIP at RCA Jan 2016, WIP at Human Feb - April 2012, Gulbenkian Gallery Gulbenkian Gallery Symposium LOSS Exhibition at Resins 3no Research Make Fragmented and Exhibition at Chichester Cathedral death of a child. Portrait in new paper with fellow Paradigm shift to student, Alison Complicated grief. Mar 2016, Mercer at RCA Oct 2012, Lose my son in the Start research project at March 2014, move on to Court final hearing. Dec 2017 RCA experiment with paper Research May 2016, Conference at 2013 June 2014, I won court Make used paper RCA Jan 2013, WIP at RCA, case on Residence: but Use milk in sizing paper Gulbenkian Gallery George never returned write paper on 2018 Paradigm shift to Haptic to my house absorption, read in Feb 2018, hand Visuality with knit poster My paper is read out at Fabrica, Brighton in in thesis and abstract conference in Hong preparation for DRS16 Kong April 2018, Viva May 2013, Sept 2016, RCA Dyson Prague ‘Pain’ 563 days before I see my Gender Generation Building, Start making resins son again. Complicated exhibition RCA Dyson Battersea grief, and a living loss. Gallery. Realise small June 2013, ‘Tears’ and figures are genderless resin exhibit at West July/Aug 2014, Make Norwood Cemetery small figures; repetition. 2017 Paradigm shift of what is Jan 2017, WIP at RCA ‘shoddy’ 5th Floor Discussed in paper and 2015 Portrait with used paper exhibition at Jan 2015, WIP at RCA March 2017 Southampton University in Gulbenkian Gallery conference 77 figures of ‘Without a May 2017, Residence ‘In Body’ the Hole’ with Linda July/ August 2013, Duvall, Paper pleating April 2015, RCA Saskatoon, Canada research biennale ‘Why Sept 2013, would I Lie?’ Exhibit September 2017, DDD11, MK and ‘Beauty’ Edge of Grief I, II and III, Digital Artist Residence Oxford at RCA Dyson Building www.digitalartistresiden Paradigm shift to Battersea ce.org emotional aspects Conversation Overseas June 2015, Maternal loss research Nov 2013, papers served M’Otherhood at into forced Child for Change of Residence Southbank University, Migration Programme Raw Edge. 116 Fig 4. ‘Diagram to show the Research Journey and Paradigm Shifts 2012 – 2018’ CHAPTER 5 FROM MADNESS TO METHOD AND BACK AGAIN Before commencing this research project, in October 2012, I had completed a Master’s dissertation, which examined a range of art and design practice research methodologies in depth. I was interested in ‘grounded theory’, and the methods that gave me access to those that made sense in terms of the creative process. When I arrived at the Royal College of Art the project was essentially a design project for an ecologically sustainable collection of clothing for mourning in contemporary funeral rites suitable for the twenty-first century. The practical aspects of designerly thinking are still residually present in this final thesis, but the context has moved a long way from a disconnected approach to general issues of death and bereavement. In spite of having lost close relatives already, something else happened that brought my relationship to mourning, loss and bereavement into a different alignment to my research method. The experience of a living loss, the difficulties of complicated grief and mourning, overturned my world. The feelings were so powerful that I had no choice but to make work that kept returning to the ‘raw’ experience of pain and absence. I was no longer a ‘designer’ working to engineer more rational methods of mourning, but a mother consumed with overwhelming grief, who turned instinctively to elements such as water, fire, then torn cloth and subsequently paper and the raw, deckle edge. It was this intense need to return to an embodied encounter with materials that was the only way forward to survive the devastation of loss. As I worked with the process of making, writing, making, creating, I could also see there was a method within this madness. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Polonius says: ‘Though this be madness, yet there be method in it.’1 Gaining an understanding of the method in the madness of loss and mourning was vital in order to see what the methodologies of arts research might learn from this practice. I tried to apply methods to my creative practice, and to read texts that would bring methodological order to the seemingly disorderly process of my return to materials, but this is not what remains as the best of the work. The best of the work is the series of pieces I made when I was beside myself with grief, troubled in psyche and soul in the madness of the situation, which I now use as a research method in my practice. 1 William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (London: The Literary Press Ltd. 1923), pp.1127 – 1171 (Act 2 Scene 2 p.1139) 117 Fig 47, The paper clay figures are fragile, eventually the bodies return to dust From earliest times, method and madness have been considered as mutually exclusive; Descartes’ thinking on methods that the mind applies in an orderly way, 2 has since been separate from its antagonist in the creating, sensing, feeling body. During the Enlightenment (1685 -1815), the idea that science and rationality had the most to offer has led to research in the arts being based on scientific method, which still resonates today. 2 René Decartes, The Philosophical Writings of Decartes Volume 2, trans. by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p.19 118 THE PROCESS: THE POESIS OF PAPER The Methodology of Process The critical difference between practice-based research and the work of the professional practitioner is outlined by Scrivener: ‘we shall argue that “researcher” intends to generate novel (by novel we mean culturally novel, not just novel to the creator or individual observers of an artefact), apprehensions by undertaking original creation, and it is this that separates the researcher from the practitioner’. 3 Wisker4 likens practice-based research to action research, as both consist of reflective practice through innovation. Research is carried out by testing and using live research. The methodology in practice-based research, in a similar way to action research, can be ‘deductive’ and rely on quantifiable results. It is useful in ‘inductive’ or conceptual elements in project-based research,5 as reflecting on the action taken is enough to generate further change. There is a process of reflection on the choice of materials that is an example of the methodology of process in practice-based art and design research, especially in individual studio practice. Complex decisions regarding materials are both a subconscious and a conscious choice for a designer or artist.6The experience of using materials may be a critical factor in artists and designers choosing to create and advance practice through practice research rather than pursuing the theoretical7. Tate Modern, in London has a floor of galleries dedicated to a collection entitled ‘Materials and Objects’, 8 posing questions about why materials are so important to artists to experiment with: the work exhibited includes the conceptual work of Sheela Gowda, including her Behold (2009), a large installation comprising human hair, the packing crates of Louise Nevelson’s Black Wall (1959) and the large-scale textile art of Magdalena Abakanowicz, whose stones made from sacking cloth, and her use of sisal, made a political statement from behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. 3 Stephen Scrivener, ‘The Art Object Does Not Embody a Form of Knowledge’, Working Papers in Art and Design, 2 (2002), available at: https://www.herts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/12311/WPIAAD_vol2_scrivener.pdf [accessed 12 April 2017], p.2 4 Gina Wisker, The Good Supervisor:Superivising Postgraduate and Undergraduate Research for Doctoral Theses and Dissertations, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Study Guides, 2005), p.235-237 5 Ibid., p.237 6 Jules Findley, Why do Art and Design Students usually choose Practice-Based PhD’s? (Anglia Ruskin University, MA Learning and Teaching submission, 2009), p.16) 7 Ibid., p.17 8 Tate Modern, London, Boiler House, Level 4 West 119 Praxis – Prototyping Craft Play - The Affect Suspension of Feminine Judgment Grounded Theory Mixed Display Methods Data Research Analysis Heuristic Reflective Practice Empathy Auto-Ethnography Fig 2 Diagram to illustrate the use of Mixed Method Research Methodologies; how they were considered and used in the Research Project – Jules Findley 120 The Praxis: Prototyping and Practice In the making of hand-made paper, the process leaves a natural, uneven edge at the ends of each piece of paper, called the deckle; it is thinner and more fragile than the dense paper in the middle. The deckle is not straight: the edge remains delicate, uneven, similar to the torn, ripped edge – but it is not an angry edge, it is naturally an uneven edge. The deckle is placed over the frame at the substrate stage to give framing to the sheet. In early book manufacturing, printers used to trim the deckle off before putting books into permanent bindings. The deckle is an important aspect of hand-made paper, and the untrimmed ragged edges are admired by book-lovers.9 Visiting the National Funeral Exhibition, a biennial exhibition for the funeral trade, in 2013 and 2015 enabled me to see inside the industry of funerals and burials. Thanatology specialists and academics attended ‘Death, Dying and Disposal’, an international biennial conference to discuss death, traditional burials and wider issues such as palliative care and social and creative solutions to death and burial. Presenting research work at the 11th DDD conference in September 2013 confirmed that two areas of difficult subject matter not easily talked about are the death of a child, and male suicide. At the beginning of my second academic year of research, September 2013, I decided to investigate the complex context of the death of a child,10 as I felt empathy towards the grief parents feel in these difficult circumstances. The conference helped my paradigm11 shift from death and dying to the emotional effects of mourning.(Fig 4, p.132 ‘Diagram to show the Research Journey and Paradigm Shifts 2012-2018’) 9 Douglas Cockerell, Bookbinding: The Classic Arts and Crafts Manual (New York: Mineola: Dover Publications, 2005), p.140 10 I chose to research the death of a child rather than suicide at the end of 2013-2014, as I felt I had more recent auto-ethnographical understanding of that area, although I had experienced the tragic suicide of a close school friend’s mother, who was also my mother’s school friend, the impact of which had shocked my family and community. I was unable to research both types of death in depth, as it was not feasible in the timescale of this PhD. According to the Office for National Statistics (2016), there were around 8,000 deaths of babies under a year including those that were still born in England and Wales. There are approximately further 1300 deaths a year from the age of 1 -19 in England and Wales. Male suicide accounted for 24.5% of male deaths in 2015 in the 35-49 age range: around 900 deaths in England and Wales. Office for National Statistics, Deaths registered in England and Wales, 2016 (London: Office for National Statistics, 2017) available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationand community/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsregisteredinenglandandwalesseries drreferencetables [accessed 30 December 2017] 11 Thomas S. Kuhn identifies that ‘paradigms provide (researchers) not only with a map but also with some of the directions essential for map-making’. Reflecting on different paradigms can alter methodologies and practice based results, i.e. practice outcomes. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), p.109. 121 Fig 21 Hand-made sheet paper, pink Fig 21 Hand-made sheet paper, pink Fig 21 Hand-made sheet paper, pink 122 Fig 21, Hand-made sheet paper, pink After my personal trauma and experiences in the summer of 2014, the paradigm in my research shifted subtly again to the maternal aspects of grief and mourning. (Fig 4 p134). The annual Work-in-Progress shows held in January at the Royal College of Art, were helpful in using the deadlines in creating and making new work as a point of focus as progression milestones. (See Glossary). By 2015, I had started researching into more complicated areas of grief through my work in developing my papermaking skills and in making the small clay figures from paper-based products, as discussed in Chapter 3. Display and Activism Display has become an increasingly important methodology during my research. Exhibiting to the public is part of my research practice, as it involves the public gaze, and it involves a reaction to or inter-action with my practice work as a means of sharing mourning. Paper, and paper products are permeable and impermeable, dissolvable in different forms, a conduit for meaning and messages. The sharing is a two-way process as my work embodies my experience of bereavement. Semiotics within the artwork become part of the language of display as a method of sharing mourning with members of the public. Ai Weiwei12 writes in his blogs that ’art is action’. He believes he is an artist-activist: when an artist creates work, in his opinion, it should create action (in terms of political statements and raising public awareness of various issues, as in a dissemination of knowledge). Ai Weiwei draws the public into his own understanding of his world and the action as he sees it through his installations. The importance of conveying semiotics in the work being publicly displayed is growing in terms of value to visitors. Could the art gallery be the new arena for the public memorialising of disaster through art? The much-needed public conversations and response to grief in sensitive memorials through a creative response and art installations in the gallery context is a critical part of mourning, involving respect for the dead and a reminder to the public of what happened for example, the Ground Zero site after the 9/11terrorist acts, World Trade Centre, New York City, in 2001. 12 Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews and Digital Rants, 2006 -2009 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), p.xvii; p.147 123 Fig 6, Edge of Grief I, II and III (2015), 2m x 2m handmade paper suspended by monofilament Display in my practice work is not about the ego, exhibition is not just about my work; it is about what is behind the work, how the work is formed, the meaning in the content and also how the work is displayed. Installation can invite interaction with the public, whether to gain more research from the public perception of a piece of practice research, or to enable the public to participate in making or thinking about the research into grief and mourning. It allows me to disseminate my practice research knowledge and it allows me to interact with the public. Interaction allows the audience to contribute in some way, even if it is to offer opinion. In this way, fresh data can be gathered and harnessed and participants can be invited into the discussion of what my research examines. 124 Svendsen discusses the fact that art does not hurt us: there is an emotional distance between what is real and what is art in terms of what we actually feel - there is an invisible barrier which protects our emotional reality as it is not really happening at the time. He quotes Oscar Wilde: ‘The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that is the function of Art to awaken. We weep, but we are not wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter…It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection; through Art and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence’.13 Svendsen suggests, in relation to emotion in performance, that when the audience feels the emotion such as fear or violence in the performance, but not the pain of it when it happens for real, when emotions and the psyche are deeply affected but different from the reality: it’s not testing the reality; but it could be regarded as a ‘safe’ practice, a test of empathy.14 Is this also true in display, where an exhibit can make you fearful or trigger pain - is it testing reality? These ‘unreal realities’ can awaken our compassion and empathy, but can they also help us in reality when faced with different types of grief? Relatives may not have had the conversations that should have taken place when the person was alive; through artwork, performance or installations there can be triggers to have these conversations before they are too late. Through my research in making installations for exhibitions, I asked the question: what is the correct level of emotional capacity that is acceptable in public display? ( See raw feedback from the exhibitions LOSS page 197 and for Edge of Grief, page 199 in the Appendix). How can it be measured effectively? Since the 1990s, ‘affect’ has become one of the key themes in contemporary critical thinking.15 Display is an unwritten language: the curator and the artist create a dialogue between the artefact and the public. In installation artwork, the installation piece is determined by the artist, as it becomes more of an environment than an isolated exhibit. Within display, not only is the material of the made artefact examined, but also how that material reacts with the surrounding space, the material against the fixed fittings in the gallery, and this has a significant impact on the exhibited work. Through installation, my aim was to disseminate my research on grief and loss to the public, to make my work emotionally moving and captivating. 13 Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, with an introduction by Vyvyan Holland (London: Collins, 1966), p.1038 14 Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Fear (London: Reaktion, 2005), p.76 15 The essence of philosophies from Spinoza, Bacon and Bergson are contemplated and the thinking of Gilles Deleuze comes to the fore in the ideas in Khanna’s article on affect (Ranjana Khanna, ‘Touching, Unbelonging and the Absence of Affect’, Feminist Theory, 13:213 (2012) 125 Fig 6, Edge of Grief I, II and III (2015), 2m x 2m handmade paper suspended by monofilament 126 Metaphor of Language in Display Pajaczkowska turns to language, connecting knowledge with its Latin roots, making connections with textiles by linking the etymology with the work. In her article, ‘Stuff and Nonsense’ she joins the Latin term ex-planere to the idea of unfolding, and similarly with the French word expliquer. In this regard, ‘complicated’ contains the notion of plier, to bend, to pleat and to unfold knowledge. Pajaczkowska explains the significance of metaphor, especially in relation to the fold, folding and unfolding, ‘folds of memory’: subconsciously, the Princess Pleater started my unfolding and folding in terms of impressing damp paper, the material, into something else. Plier, to fold, is encompassed in ‘complicated’ (grief). The idea of unfolding knowledge is complicated, uncertain as shame and the unsaid being usually associated in complicated grief. This textile materiality, which Pajaczkowska identifies as ‘the medium of knowing and not knowing’,17 following Jung,18 is a key to original research in project work, allowing the work to become individual, personal and original. My work it is not made for art’s sake: it is important that there is an emotional connection and meaning within the fibre and fabric of the piece and the engagement that piece makes with the viewer. My aim in developing my work is to create work with meaning in the result, to convey a message to make action to enable change and further research. The Influence of the Hapt Professor Laura Marks discussed folding and unfolding,19 in a lecture on haptic visuality at the Royal College of Art in January 2013. She describes a haptic image as one that is neither able to be discerned clearly, nor is it clear from where it has originated. The fashion and textiles research students at the RCA were invited to submit an image for a poster for their Work in Progress show (January 2013). Each of us produced a printed A1 paper poster that was exhibited in the RCA’s Gulbenkian Gallery alongside our abstracts. The exhibition was used as a means for discussion to further reflect on our research work with our peers. My submission was an enlargement of a photograph of the original hand stitched lace pattern of the knitted piece from my 2012 work, I Never had a Chance (Fig 7 p.8). The 17 Claire Pajaczkowska, ‘On Stuff and Nonsense: The Complexity of Cloth’, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 3:3 (2005), 220–249. (p.228) 18 Carl G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious [1959] (Collective Works of Carl G. Jung, Volume 9 Part 1,), 2nd. edn. (London: Routledge 1991), p.81 19 Pennina Barnett, ‘Folds, fragments, surfaces: towards a poetics of cloth’, in: Textures of Memory: The Poetics of Cloth (Nottingham: Angel Row Gallery, 1999), pp.25-34, p.26 127 The Metaphor of Language in Display Pajaczkowska16 turns to language connecting up knowledge with its Latin roots, making connections with textiles by linking the etymology with the work. In her article, ‘Stuff and Nonsense’ she joins up the Latin term ex-planere to the idea of unfolding, and similarly with the French word expliquer. In this regard, ‘complicated’ contains the notion of plier, to bend, to pleat and to unfold The 16 Claire Pajaczkowska, ‘On Stuff and Nonsense: The Complexity of Cloth’, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 3:3 (2005), 220–249. (p.223) 128 Fig 18, Pain (2013), Jules Findley, photographic image on paper, haptic visuality. Work in Progress RCA 2013, Gulbenkian Gallery, Royal College of Art. photograph was magnified in such a way that it was impossible to identify where it came from: it would not have been immediately obvious that it originated from hand-knitting. The double-knitting was hand-knitted in thick, black yarn with a lacy pattern. The black yarn was absorbent: it soaked up the light in its entirety; like paper, it was non-reflective, willing to soak up the surrounding environment. I photographed it against the light, focusing my image-making on the holes that let the light through. The image was enlarged and edited by adding a red-coloured hue to the black, creating the heat from pain. The image, Pain (2013), in my view, endeavoured to encompass the intense pain people feel when they are bereaved: the pain of bereavement is felt deeply but goes unseen (Fig 18 , page 128). Marks defined haptic visuality in her lecture at the Royal College of Art as follows: ‘Haptic criticism is a kind of criticism that assumes a tactile relation to one’s object – touching, more than looking. The notion of the haptic is sometimes used in art to refer to a lack of visual depth, so that the eye travels on the surface of an object rather than move into illusionistic depth. I prefer to describe haptic visuality as a kind of seeing that uses the eye like an organ of touch’.20 The haptic visual image of Pain (Fig 18), had been subconsciously created; this understanding enabled a profound change of paradigm in my work. From the conscious making of an object or product, I moved my work forward into the abstract. The materials shifted from fabric to resin to paper and paper-based products, and realising haptic awareness made me aware of the abstract and connecting with the emotions in my work. Mapping the progress of making these shifts in my research and learning correlates with changing techniques and progress using display (Fig4, page116). I discovered paper as a material conduit in my research on grief issues. The Marks lecture influenced the focus of material in terms of hapticity and tactility. The idea that the eye or ‘looking’, creates a relationship between the object and the gaze from the viewer in haptic visuality, making an experience that can be ‘as gentle as a caress’,21 gave me an introduction to a new language with which to 20 Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Talk by Professor Laura U. Marks at the Royal College of Art, London, January 2013 21 Angus Forbes, ‘Haptic Visuality: Laura U. Marks’s Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media’, Transliteracies Project, available at: http://transliteracies.english. ucsb.edu/post/research-project/research-clearinghouse-individual/objects-for-study-individual/ all-objects-for-study/haptic-visuality, 129 130 Fig 48, Work in Progress Banner explore the emotional aspects of bereavement through making paper by hand: this was profound, and opened up new creative and research horizons. My work on fragmentation, edges and the torn paper is fragile and gentle, although the ideas behind the work could be seen as violent and aggressive. Bereavement is a period of profound sensitivity. Paper can express these fragile emotions aptly - the consistency of the papermaking mix can be changed to reflect the depth of emotion, and the many aspects of the feelings of grief. In examining rituals of death, particularly in the death of a baby or child, there are new rituals, new memories which can be personalised for a grieving family. Investigating the rituals that accompany the process of a burial is humbling and filled with compassion: as with birth, within death the materiality of textiles is ever-present. Play as a Methodology The methodology of play comes into papermaking early on in the process of the practice, part of composite integrated methods: the paradigm of play seems a misfit in terms of the seriousness of grief. Rachel Philpott describes the research journey in terms of fragments, multiple sources of parts, raw material that moves, not staying still.22 Jung describes creativity thus: ‘the creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from the inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves’.23 Scientists learn from the methods of play, although they practise the methods of the laboratory, where there is a ‘control’ group in experimentation.24 Are scientists sceptical of failure due to many of their experiments being unsuccessful? ‘Science begins with the null hypothesis, which assumes that the claim under investigation is not true until demonstrated otherwise.’25 Joel Achenbach states that human brains seek pattern in order to create meaning, that randomness does not sit well: ‘uncertainty is inevitable at the frontiers of knowledge.’26 22 Rachel Philpott, Structural Textiles: Adaptable Form and Surface in Three Dimensions (Unpublished PhD thesis, Royal College of Art, 2011), available at: http://researchonline.rca. ac.uk/434/1/Philpott_Rachel_PhD_Textiles_Structural_Textiles_Thesis_2011.pdf p.51 23 Carl G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious [1959] (Collective Works of Carl G. Jung, Volume 9 Part 1,), 2nd. edn. (London: Routledge 1991), p.15 24 CRT or ‘Controlled Randomised Testing’ has been considered the prototype for all researchers. 25 Michael Shermer, ‘What Skepticism Reveals about Science’ Scientific American, Jul 1 2009 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-skepticism-reveals/ 26 Joel Achenbach, ‘Why do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?’ National Geographic (March 2015), available at: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/03/science-doubters/ achenbach-text 131 132 Fig 49, Reflections from Notebooks Are artists sceptical of failure, susceptible in a similar way to scientists? Failure surely leads outcomes in a different direction. Jung writes on failure: ‘Mistakes are, after all the foundations of truth and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not’.27 Roger Caillois suggests that play has six characteristics, that it is; ‘1. Free, 2. Separate, 3. Uncertain, 4. Unproductive, 5. Regulative, 6. Fictive’28. Play is an activity made from choice, a separate activity from the everyday, routine aspects of life. In terms of papermaking, through the introduction of other dimensions, differences in paper qualities, fabrics, and meanings, the outcome is uncertain. It is different from an iterative method in which one is consciously aware of what the preconceived outcome is going to be. Play is closer to the sublime, although the sublime is closer to death, as it is uncertain. Heuristic play is evident, as knowledge can be obtained without intervention. Heuristic play is not necessarily limited to child-like curiosity, but is equally applicable to adults. I witness heuristic play in adults when I disseminate my making workshops to students: when the students take this workshop knowledge home and make their own interpretations and augment their new tacit knowledge in making paper; their new knowledge, skills and curiosity returns back to me for further discussion. The heuristic is present in the serendipity of play (the uncertain). The research I am investigating is a combination of the sublime and play, through the poesis of paper. Connecting with the heuristic moves into the sensory. Sensory play in paper is experienced in mixing with substrates and manipulating materials by hand. In individual research the iterative testing and cycle of testing knowledge through practice, how practice links up to hypothesis is how the knowledge changes and the paradigm changes. It’s in taking unexpected risks, according to Caillois, in which the player makes the unplanned ‘missing his stroke’ approach to his game where dynamics can change. Through reflection the rational/intellectual is integrated into individual creative practice. Caillois writes, on biomimicry: ‘The ultimate problem turns out in the final analysis to be that of ‘distinction’: distinctions between the real and the imaginary, between the waking and sleeping, between ignorance and knowledge, …. in short, distinctions in which valid consideration must demonstrate a keen awareness and the demand for resolution. …at least there is none in which the tangible experience of separation is more immediate.’29 27 Carl G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious [1959] (Collective Works of Carl G. Jung, Volume 9 Part 1,), 2nd. edn. (London: Routledge 1991), p.76 28 Roger Caillois Man, Play and Games (New York: Schocken Books, 1979), p.43 29 Ibid., p.45 133 Fig 49, Reflections from Notebooks 134 The Reflective-Practitioner Donald Schön discusses the understanding of reflection to professionals and researchers in practice as well as theory. He writes: ‘The practitioner allows himself to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique. He reflects on the phenomenon before him, and on prior understandings which have been implicit in his behaviour’.30 These words could relate to play, as well as to reflection. The dialogue Schön describes is essential in making new creative practice, it is critical in generating new knowledge through experimentation: ‘When a practitioner makes sense of a situation he perceives to be unique, he sees it as something already present in his repertoire. To see this site as that one is not to subsume the first under a familiar category or rule. It is, rather to see the unfamiliar, unique situation as both similar to and different from the familiar one, without at first being able to say similar or different with respect to what. The familiar situation functions as a precedent, or a metaphor, or…an exemplar for the unfamiliar one’.31 Schön’s model of reflection has been criticised in an article by Robin Usher, Ian Bryant and Rennie Johnston32 for not interrogating his own method; the authors suggest he may not have clarified the reflective process involved, or the idea of psychological theory underpinning his reflection in and on action. There are no doubts that Schön’s ideas have been accepted as having a significant impact on practice research ideas. Fiona Doloughan33 cites Schön’s writing about materials in context of design, noting the idea of ‘design as a conversation with the materials of a situation’.34 She discusses the idea of language articulating and changing a ‘given situation’ through ‘reflective action’. Doloughan discusses the language of design as being made up of drawing and talking, doing and reflecting, parallel ways of designing. She sees in synaesthesia35’the transduction of meaning from one semiotic mode to another semiotic mode’,36an activity the 30 Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p.68 31 Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p.138 32 Robin Usher, Ian Bryant and Rennie Johnston, Adult Education and the Postmodern Challenge (London: Routledge, 1997), p.149 33 Fiona J. Doloughan, ‘The Language of Reflective Practice in Art and Design’, Design Issues, 18:2 (2002), 57-65; p.61 34 Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p.78 35 Gunther Kress,‘Design and Transformation: New Theories of Meaning’, in: Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis (eds.), Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures (London: Routledge 2000), pp. 153-161, p.159 36 Fiona J. Doloughan, ‘The Language of Reflective Practice in Art and Design’, Design Issues, 18:2 (2002), 57-65, p.62 135 brain performs continually. There is a language of grief and bereavement, which interacts with art; Doloughan writes about language being multilayered, metaphysical, metaphorical and qualitative, and in art and design being poetic. This is also true for Freud’s approach to mourning in meta-psychoanalysis, through the use of language in transforming behaviour. The writing about creative concepts, gives way to a new type of discourse. According to Gunther Kress,37 in the process of redesign, rethinking transformations are always being made, as design is semiotic thought. I will return to the notion of the meta in Chapter 7. Schön provided ideas for group and public learning, an area in which research could be freely disseminated and distributed.38 My research data in my writing is published research, except where I have gathered my own primary interactive research through short questionnaires during my exhibitions (See Appendix pages 197 and 199 for examples). Special ethical considerations, in terms of permissions to use this feedback have not been relevant, as the exploration of the medical aspect of looking at tissues, for which I would need these special permissions in place, is not part of this research. There have been no case studies of adults or children who would need to be approached for permission to use sensitive, personal research data. In relation to the discussion of ethics in Denzin and Lincoln’s work on qualitative research,39 my research into sensitive areas such as bereavement, grief and mourning has relevance for the examination of a Code of Ethics that concerns the following: informed consent, in terms of interviewees who must be willing to participate; deception, mainly aimed at experiments: privacy and confidentiality, concerning the safe-guarding of people’s identities, and accuracy ensuring that the data is correct and safe-guarding the data is an ethical requirement. Informed consent was give for the raw data on LOSS, (See Appendix page 197 for an example of feedbck from the exhibition). Progressing my research by looking at creative and investigative methodologies, my concerns are that my research touches on very sensitive personal issues, and therefore the impact of the exhibited work is taken into account when realising some of the outcomes for public display. 37 Gunther Kress, ‘Design; The Rhetorical Work of Shaping the Semiotic World’, in A. Archer and D. Newfield (eds.), Multimodal Approaches to Research and Pedagogy, (London: Routledge, 2014), pp.131-152 Ch8, p.142 38 Donald Schön, Beyond the Stable State: Public and Private Learning in a Changing Society (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1973), p.109 39 Norman Denzin and Yvonne Denzin K. Norman and Yvonna Lincoln, The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3rd. edn. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005), p.144 136 CHAPTER 6 ARTISTS REVIEW Case Studies of Artist’s using Autobiography with the Making of Embodied Materiality and Grief This chapter was difficult to write, as it involved judgment in narrowing down the choice of artists who used their own experiences to create their work and influence the questions in my research. There were considerations of the emotional impact of the artist’s work on my own work, my emotional reaction to their work, and the emotional content of the artist in their artwork. Käthe Kollwitz Kollwitz’s work demonstrates the power of maternal affect and grief, and conveys deep emotions in her work. This powerful ability to connote affect translates into her sculpture from her original drawings. Kollwitz originally memorialised death by making woodcuts; through her artwork she tried to draw public attention to the need to end the First World War. The force of the depiction of pain and emotion captivates and involves the viewer into Kollwitz’s emotional dialogue. As a passive onlooker, one is aware of the dreadful pain involved in losing a child, a young hero of war, but more humanly of a mother losing a teenager. Murray Parkes and Prigerson1 cite a diary entry made by Kollwitz in 1916: ‘There’s a drawing made, a mother letting her dead son slide into her arms. I could do a hundred similar drawings but still can’t seem to come any closer to him. I’m still searching for him as if it were in the very work itself that I had to find him.’ Kollwitz had lost her youngest son, Peter, just months after he had joined up, fighting in action in Flanders in 1914, when he was eighteen years old; her attachment and yearning for her son two years after his death conveyed the pain of her loss. The rhythm of Kollwitz’s hand-drawn work presents a three-dimensional approach to the human body. Kollwitz conveys an almost solid being through her drawing technique with her intimate knowledge of form. It is the expression and pose of the model that creates the intense emotions of despair. This pose has similarities with, and differences from, Kollwitz’s bronze sculpture Mother with Dead Son also known as Pietà. Kollwitz wrote a letter to Erich Krems, a friend of her son Peter, in November 1914:2 ‘There is in our lives a wound which will never heal. Nor should it. To give 1 Colin Murray Parkes and Holly G. Prigerson, Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life (London: Penguin, 2010), p.48 2 Käthe Kollwitz, The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz, ed. Hans Kollwitz, trans. Richard and Clara Winston [1955] (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p.144. After diary entry November 2014, announcing the death of Peter, a letter written to family friend Erich Krems. Written by Kollwitz’s older son, Holger a survivor of the First World War. Peter was part of the 137 Fig 14, Fig 26, Fig 33 Storyboard discussing fragmentation 138 birth to a child, to raise him and after eighteen precious years to see his talents developing, to see what rich fruit the tree will bear – and then to have it cut short…’ Eighteen years after the death of Peter, in 1932, Kollwitz completed a commemorative memorial for him in Roggevelde, a German war cemetery, where he was buried, which was taken to Vladslo, Belgium, when Peter’s grave was moved there. Grieving Parents consists of two large statues of a mother and father, both on their knees before their son’s grave. The parents kneel on separate platforms about a metre apart from each other, both with their arms wrapped round their own bodies, as if their intense sadness had made their relationship divide, rather than unite, in grief. The kneeling statues individually, portray the acceptance of self-reproach, suffering and guilt.3 As Peter entered service under eighteen, like many other young soldiers, he would have needed signed parental permission. Käthe Kollwitz and her husband approved their youngest son’s application to go to war. The scale of the figures is impressive as a mark of the enormous grief and pain parents feel when they have lost a child. Kollwitz made the maquette for Pietà in 1937, when she was seventy years old. This sculpture, enlarged in 1993 as part of the Neue Wache war memorial in Berlin, would eventually become highly influential in helping to educate and allow for personal reflection and the expression of grief. The pose she has chosen for the mother, bent over in grief for her dead son, leaning inward to protect her heart and his body, head bowed, indicates that she is not letting go of something she had borne which is so dear to her as a mother, resonates with my questions of maternal grief and using embodied materiality in my work in addressing how mothers feel in absence of their child. I chose Kollwitz’s drawing work as it resonate with some of my earlier drawing work in the fragmented portraits series. I felt that Kollwitz created affect in her work helped to convey strong emotions of grief that are commonly felt by the public. I felt her work expressed such intense feelings of sorrow, that it related to my research question of materialising mourning. Kollwitz’s sculptures helped the public to process their own deep emotions and let go of the pain and loss not easily being able to convey or express themselves, especially after the First World War. Käthe Kollwitz used her then seven-year-old son Peter, as a model for her drawing work to aid her expressive poses. Her work was able to help me express my own ideas of grief and loss. Kriegsbegeisterung, or ‘war enthusiasm’ joining up early before he was compulsory enlisted. 3 Jay Winter, ‘Remembrance and Redemption: a Social Interpretation of War Memorials’, Harvard Design Magazine 9, ‘Constructions of Memory: On Monuments Old and New’ (Autumn 1999), 71 139 140 Fig 35, Bodies ready to be transported in picnic container to an exhibition Louise Bourgeois Louise Bourgeois was twenty years old when her mother, to whom she was very close, died in 1932. Bourgeois had just finished studying at art school in Paris; she opened up her own gallery selling prints and her artwork in a corner of her father’s tapestry studio. She met her future husband when he walked into the shop. In 1938 Bourgeois, newly married, emigrated to New York to live with her American husband. Shortly afterwards, thinking they could not have their own children, they adopted a baby orphan boy from Paris. Later, Bourgeois gave birth naturally to two further boys. Bourgeois found life hard with three young boys in New York City, in a new country and with a new language, often on her own. Bourgeois struggled to get to grips with her everyday life, and found difficulties in accepting motherhood: she said that at the time she felt she was a girl who had children, rather than a mother.4 The theme of motherhood and domesticity is central to Bourgeois’ work; in her work are embodied metaphors of loss, and the expectations of mothers, women and the maternal perspective. I visited the major exhibition of Bourgeois’ work at the Guggenheim, Bilbao, in August 2016, where I was able to explore her work, particularly Cells. This series consisted of installations Bourgeois made in the former clothing factory that she used as her studio in Brooklyn, having worked previously in her cramped apartment in Chelsea, Manhattan. The Cell series consists of small, isolated, enclosed installations made from old doors (some from wardrobes, others from the doors of former theatre gallery boxes) bolted together to make a contained space enclosing found or made objects which have a meaning, or a group of objects to create discussion. In the Guggenheim exhibition there were four large rooms given over to the Cells installation. Reviewing the work, I was able to gain a better understanding of her fears about her own role in motherhood, the home and domesticity. The pictures and sculptures are of a mother being subsumed by the house, the individual female identity replaced by domestic expectations and the machinations of the home instead of an individual artist. The idea of domestic entrapment and feeling subsumed into domesticity rather than being an individual mother is intensely felt, and these frustrations were included in Bourgeois’ mid-1940s Femme Maison paintings, in which the house becomes the mother’s head, before she moved into sculptures. Cells displayed Bourgeois’ feelings of anger and frustration, at being a woman, her sex, motherhood, growing through her womanhood until she was no longer fertile. She uses powerful analogy through objects – examining bodily fluids 4 Storr, Robert, Paulo Herkenhoff and Allan Schwartzman, Louise Bourgeois (London: Phaidon, 2003), p.14 141 by using glass vessels, the mirror reflecting her sense of self – and her use of colours, blue signifying peace and masculinity, red meaning pain and womanhood, the dyed muslin tea bags signifying the empty womb, sewing threads indicating time passing. In some of these installations, Bourgeois included the tapestries that she grew up with in her parents’ shop, re-using fragments of these valuable, antique cloths in her work. The reassurance of the large, almost clumsy, hand-stitched textiles signify a memory of her mother, often portrayed as a spider in her sculptures, as being protective. Her authoritarian father was reduced to a pile of bones in one of her works, in which she recalls a dream about how she and her children dissected his body and ate him up. (The Destruction of the Father, 1974). Reading the writings of Bourgeois, alongside her physical work, conveys so aptly her feelings. The candid references are sometimes hand-embroidered and used in her installations. Bourgeois wrote about her anxieties, being abandoned by her mother through death, and about her children: ‘I am afraid of silence I am afraid of the dark I am afraid to fall down I am afraid of insomnia I am afraid of emptiness Is there something missing? Yes, something is missing and always will be missing The experience of emptiness To miss What are you missing? Nothing I am imperfect but I am lacking nothing May be something is missing but I do not know and therefore do not suffer Empty stomach empty house empty bottle The falling into a vacuum signals the abandonment of the mother’5 Bourgeois made a series of soft, patched fragmented figures and faces that she had hand stitched and stuffed attracted me initially. The rough texture of the fragmented towelling and bandages somehow resembles the rough texture of limestone. 6 In Cinq (2007),7 the large mother’s head, her husband’s head and three smalle heads hang down. The fabric of the mother’s head is made of a 5 Louise Bourgeois I am Afraid (2009), Tate Modern, London http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ bourgeois-i-am-afraid-al00341 6 Reference to the small (11cm in height), female statue, made c. 24,000 – 22,000 BC, known as the Venus of Willendorf, thought to be a tribute to motherhood and fertility made from Oolitic limestone 7 Cinq, five in French, was relevant to Bourgeois in signifying her three boys, her husband and herself. The figures three and five recur in Bourgeois’ work. Robert Storr, Paulo Herkenhoff and Allan Schwartzman, Louise Bourgeois (London: Phaidon, 2003), p.11 142 frayed mattress ticking but it’s the wrapping and fragmentation in the piece that is important to me: the strips are wrapped around the head like a bandaged mummy as preservation and stitched irreverently in patches. All the heads are touching each other, and are tight together as a family bond, despite being decapitated and upside down. The significance of this bonding and closeness is important to Bourgeois, and it infuenced my work in the Fragmented Portraits as I stitched the sheets of handmade paper together. Bourgeois started making her textile series when she was around sixty, and continued making these until her nineties. She reused her own clothes and those of her children, and fragments of tapestries. She started sewing heads and groups of heads and bodies. The stitching was bold, as if mending the relationships with her children, the hand-stitching being visible rather than invisible in the repair. It was as if in her mind she was going over events, and she was healing these relationships by materialising her objects, mending, stitching from events in her psyche, her soul: reparation work. The preservation of family bonds; surely this is what we all desire in our relationships? Isn’t this part of the fragility of grief and fragmentation, when close relatives die without the preservation of those close bonds? How does that make us feel loved, those of us left behind? In Herkenhoff’s interview with Louise Bourgeois, it is evident that Bourgeois sees memory as part of her being in control: ‘memory has become so important to me because it gives me the feeling of being in control, control of the past’.8 I chose Bourgeois’ work as a case study for my research as Bourgeois uses her parents, her family and herself as frames of reference in her work, and her autobiographical approach to her work resonated with my authoethnographical methodology. Her approach to her experimentation, her candid displays and her poetry gave me answers to my questions on embodied materiality using paper, liquid and stitch. She discusses how one continues through her life, even though our relationships are not perfect, but fragile, fragmented and fractured; we have to live our lives until death; the guilt, and grief go with us and live within us. I felt the exploration of these difficult emotional subjects Bourgeois makes, had parralels with my research questions about relationships in complicated grief. The pain Bourgeois felt in her familial relationships is evident in her daily work, her repetition of themes, domesticity, working through emotions such as grief, guilt, reparative textiles, as well as her writing in conjunction with her practice work confirmed the materiality created by paper and paper based products, after I visited ‘Cells’ exhibited in Bilbao in 2016. 8 Storr, Robert, Paulo Herkenhoff and Allan Schwartzman, Louise Bourgeois (London: Phaidon, 2003), p.10 143 frayed 144 Fig 28, Soil painting painted in ‘In the Hole’ Residence, Saskatoon, Canada, May 2017 Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois Emin worked in collaboration with Louise Bourgeois on a series of sixteen intimate drawings over two years from 2009 to 2011, called Do not Abandon Me. The work jointly responded to and explored themes of identity, loss, abandonment and sexuality through a joint response and collaboration. They were some of the last drawings made by Bourgeois before she died. Bourgeois’s bold corporeal imagery of males and females, but mainly females, started as drawings of the pregnant female, sometimes drawn with the tiny foetus in a simple colour palette of reds and blues in gouache, sometimes with a black outline. Emin was intimidated by Bourgeois’ drawings, due to her reputation: ‘I carried the images around the world with me from Australia to France, but I was too scared to touch them’9 Emin’s line drawings are small in comparison to Louise Bourgeois’ more open statements in bold paint. Bourgeois paints with colour on wet paper, making a clear, strong colour, which disperses across the page like ink. In one painting the male is blue but his penis is red, indicating he may have recently had sex with a woman; sometimes the woman is painted with mixed red and blue, making a purple colour. In one drawing a pregnant woman, coloured pink, carrying a foetus painted blue to indicate he is a male, and in another drawing a male form is coloured in pink with a painted blue phallus. Emin makes small images around the genitalia, and some of these mock the male phallus; some of the images of the larger women are amusing. The smallness of the characters of Emin’s drawings contrast well with Bourgeois’ larger, expressive painted work. Scale has played a role in creating a light-hearted look at serious issues, and makes the viewer look more closely into the work to understand the meaning. On some of the shared drawings Emin hand-writes what Bourgeois is expressing in her paintings, such as ‘Dark Black Lonely Space’, ‘I Lost You’, ‘I Wanted to Love you more’; ‘and so I kissed you’; ‘Sexy Mothers’. The series of drawings and subsequent prints became one of the last series of work Bourgeois was to complete in her lifetime. In many ways, the two artists had similarities in their loss of family. The significance of this series of works lies not just in its offering of a discussion on gender but also in its exploration of the notion that in death families are fragmented. the collaboarion resonated with my research questions on embodied materiality. Through their collaboration I was able to understand that fragmentation in families shows itself far earlier than in death: through love, even at birth. 9 Bourgeois, Louise and Tracey Emin, Do Not Abandon Me (London: Hauser and Wirth, 2011), available at: http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/814/louise-bourgeois-tracey-emin-do-not-abandon-me/ view 145 Storyboard to show use of elements, Fig 40 and Fig 24 146 The work of Tracey Emin in the context of Loss Tracey Emin and her Abortions Tracey Emin has no experience of bearing live children and bringing them up, however, she makes work from a maternal perspective, which is emotional. Of Emin’s exhibition at White Cube, Mason’s Yard in 2009, called, ‘Those who Suffer Love’, the artist said: ‘the title of my show is self-explanatory: love rarely comes easily and if it does, it usually goes quite quickly. And there is death, and loss, which at some point in our lives we all have to deal with. I’m constantly fighting with the notion of love and passion’. Tracey Emin discussed the maternal issues of the subject of loss in a sensitive manner in her retrospective exhibition ‘Works’ at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 2013. Emin studied at the Royal College of Art, and was one of the original ‘Young British Artists’ (‘YBAs’) supported and collected by Charles Saatchi in the 1990s; these also included the artists Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn, Mark Wallinger, Gavin Turk, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville, Tacita Dean, Rachel Whiteread and Cornelia Parker. Emin became well known when she exhibited her work My Bed in 1998: this was an emotional portrayal of Emin’s experience of staying in bed for four days, in the midst of an emotional flux, love and crisis, eating, sleeping, making love and smoking. It depicts her emotional breakdown and the state of her life during a particular period of time, when she was thirty-five years old and after she had experienced her abortions. Emin had two abortions quite close together, one in 1990 and the other in 1992. In 1990, after her first abortion, Emin already felt the physical pain and was racked with guilt and grief, as the abortion went wrong and her womb became infected. Days later, Emin expelled the foetus: it fell into her hands in the back of a London black taxicab. Emin writes: ‘Became Pregnant – had an abortion. It went wrong. Caught the foetus – slipping down my thigh – cried and cried.’ In the work CV Cunt Vernacular 1997, Emin reflects on her abortions.10 Looking at Emin’s work made after the loss of the potential babies, one witnesses an outpouring of grief and guilt at the abortion of her foetuses. The letter exhibited alongside the images in My Abortion 1990 (1963-93/2000)11 recalls: ‘I had killed the thing which I could love the most. /Forgive me tiny little Thing…Forgive me- Leave me’. Emin stated, on reflection about the work in the Abortion series: ‘they’re like a declaration of my sorrow of the time – For years I viewed them with sadness, I now know, they are a symbol of my own celebration of my freedom – A door I opened and closed- like a snap shot of my 10 Tracey Emin ‘CV Cunt Vernacular’ Tate Gallery, 1997, accessed at http://www.tate.org.uk/art/ artworks/emin-tracey-emin-c-v-cunt-vernacular-t07663 [accessed 30 December 2017] 11 Jennifer Doyle ‘Lost and Found’ in Corris, Michael, Jennifer Doyle, Ali Smith, Cliff Lauson, et al., Tracey Emin: Love is What You Want (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2011), p.39 147 soul’.12Exhibited in ‘Those Who Suffer Love’ is a monoprint diary made in 1991 consisting of 24 line drawings of Emin in various states of imaginary pregnancy. The line drawings are blue, and she questions in one drawing, ‘Is this me?’ Emin writes in 1992: ‘Became pregnant again – had another abortion – didn’t give a damn. Just did it – dealt with it without heart’.13In 1992, whilst she was at the Royal College of Art, Emin ‘committed emotional suicide’ and smashed up her paintings.14 A few years later, Emin reflected on and explored motherhood in her work in Feeling Pregnant (2000), which was also exhibited at White Cube in 2009, investigating the meaning of maternal loss and bereavement through mixed media. Emin expressed the feeling of the body, or her body, being out of control in terms of physical and emotional changes. In Feeling Pregnant II (1999 – 2002), she writes five pages of framed handwritten notes: ‘I feel different, not my usual self’, she writes, ‘…something beautiful – peaceful – wrapped up in a pink shrimp cloth – curled up. A small dead Ball’. Emin is not pregnant, it’s Emin’s imagination, and beside the work are five pairs of baby shoes on white shelves next to the panels of notes. In another box, Emin has crocheted baby clothes whilst she is waiting for her period to arrive. Jennifer Doyle has explored the idea of a ‘poetics of interruption’ in relation to this work, and discusses Emin examining ‘pregnancy as a state of possibility’.15 Emin rationalised the act of abortion when she was interviewed in a documentary, How it Feels,16made in 1996: ‘the team filmed the place where she went to the doctors and he told her that she was lucky to get pregnant. The doctor told her that this would probably be the last opportunity for her to have a child’. In the 2011 documentary film ‘In Confidence’,17 in interview with Laurie Taylor, Emin says: ‘I’m angry actually, which is why it is quite hard for me to talk, I’m really angry about it. I didn’t think coming back here would make me so angry, I thought I’d probably be able to act or do something. I thought that I might even be able to smile and say I’ve got over this, but no I haven’t. I don’t think I will ever really get over it.’18 12 Ibid., p.38 13 Tracey Emin, Royal College of Art https://www.rca.ac.uk/studying-at-the-rca/ the-rca-experience/student-voices/rca-luminaries/tracey-emin/ [accessed 30 December, 2017] 14 Jennifer Doyle ‘Lost and Found’ in Corris, Michael, Jennifer Doyle, Ali Smith, Cliff Lauson, et al., Tracey Emin: Love is What You Want (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2011), p.37 15 Jennifer Doyle ‘Lost and Found’ in Corris, Michael, Jennifer Doyle, Ali Smith, Cliff Lauson, et al., Tracey Emin: Love is What You Want (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2011) p.35 16 Stuart Morgan, ‹The Story of I: Interview with Tracey Emin’, Frieze, issue 34, May 1997, pp.56-61 p.57 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/emin-tracey-emin-c-v-cunt-vernacu- lar-t07663 ‘A week from Hell ‘94’ describes Emin’s life of chaos. 17Taylor, Laurie with Tracey Emin In Confidence Documentary, Season 2: Episode 7 (Associated-Redefusion Television, 2011) 18 Freedman, Carl and Tracey Emin, Tracey Emin: Works 1963-2006 (New York: Rizzoli, 2006) p.63 148 Emin saw that having a baby would be an onerous obstacle in her life: as in her perception of herself as an artist she could not have given up everything to her art had she had children. Emin went on to create Little Coffins (2002), Something’s Wrong (2002), and The First Time I was Pregnant I Started to Crochet the Baby a Shawl (1999-2000).19 Even as late as 2007 Emin was making embroidery pieces about pregnancy and even about herself being pregnant. There is something deeply entrenched in Emin and the views of her mother about having a child out of wedlock, as mentioned in the interview with Emin and her mother in the 2011 documentary.20 Tracey Emin’s mother voices her opinion in the documentary that her daughter should never have children, and that it would be a source of frustration to Emin. Could this be a reason why Emin returned to the maternal, after she had complied with her mother’s wishes? Tracey Emin on the loss of her father. Apart from the more horrific emotional ‘mourning work’, of Emin depicting her abortions, I was particularly drawn to her installations, her textile art, as well as the video of her fond memories of her father, as a positive recording of her loss. Reflecting on these autobiographical works helped me locate my work within art instead of design. It was in her 2013 retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, ‘Love is What You Want’, that enabled me to shift my research paradigm, reframing my resarch from design to art and to understand embodied materiality from complicated grief. Miyako Ishiuchi and the photographs of her deceased mother’s clothing One of the reasons why I chose Miyako Ishiuchi was because at the beginning of her career, she was trained in textile craft, specialising in weave in Japan before becoming a photographer known for her conceptual photographs of memory. The other reason was that her photographs of her mother’s personal clothing before she could let them go are emotionally evocative, photographed with the sensitivity of someone familiar with textiles and the compassion of intimacy. Ishiuchi wrote: ‘Objects that my mother had used in her daily life were suddenly rendered useless. Her old undergarments, which had lost the only value they had, as the familiar attire of their owner, seemed to me to be almost pieces of her skin.’21 19 Freedman, Carl and Tracey Emin, Tracey Emin: Works 1963-2006 (New York: Rizzoli, 2006) 20 Taylor, Laurie with Tracey Emin In Confidence Documentary, Season 2: Episode 7 (Associated-Redefusion Television, 2011) 21 Maddox, Amanda, Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows (Los Angeles: John Paul Getty Museum, 2015), p.125 149 Grief hoarding is the habit of holding on to things after someone has died. Ishiuchi makes a personal discovery and a practical method - she needs and even wants to give her mother’s clothing away but finds she is unable to do so, until she forensically photographs them, and the memory of her mother’s body is encapsulated into the photographs. This is a personal and yet a practical meth- od of detachment. The black and white photographs form a personal account of her pain of bereavement; they also act as an archive of her mother’s personal effects. The effects from domestic life: lipsticks, 1960s bottles of nail varnish with long thin plastic tops, false teeth: these intimate objects are photographed on a clean ground.22 The objects stand alone, not in their usual arrangement as clus- ters of clutter in a domestic setting. It was the black and white undergarments that had special significance for me. Ischiuchi talks about the straightforward act of taking of a photograph: the action is creative and you encounter something: however, it is in the darkroom that the psychological, physical and emotional side takes over and the work becomes conceptual. The photographs of Miyako Ishiuchi’s mother’s personal undergarments influenced my approach to my work using paper. They convey a poignancy and memory of her mother in the transparency of the clothing, made in black and white, as the clothes have retained the memory of her mother, imprinted into the clothing, leaving the impressions of her mother’s being in the undergarments, such as the long knickers. Could this ‘otherness’ that Lewis23 so aptly described be the missing soul of the wearer? Ishiuchi writes about people’s auras and the superstition that these are left behind in clothing after it is worn, especially when related to a kimono, which in Japan is regarded like a second skin.24 The curator Kashara Michiko, sums up Ishiuchi’s work by writing: ‘Death is always the experience of the living. The deceased person can tell us nothing about death; it is the living, the survivors, who speak of and share their thoughts about the deceased, recount the stories of their lives, tell tales of their wisdom.’25 Kashara cites Taki Koji: ‘Each of us have several special dead people who are part of us. The omnipresent awareness represents not so much our memories of the dead as their posthumous existence’.26 The pain felt in bereavement, the 22 Michiko Kashara essay in Ischiuchi, Miyako, Mothers 200-2005: Traces of the Future (Japan: The Japan Foundation and Tankosha Publishing Co., 2005), p.126 23 Clive S. Lewis ‘A Grief Observed’ (London: Faber 1961), p.18 24 Michiko Kashara essay in Ischiuchi, Miyako, Mothers 200-2005: Traces of the Future (Japan: The Japan Foundation and Tankosha Publishing Co., 2005), p.125 25 Ibid., p.122 26 Michiko Kashara essay in Ischiuchi, Miyako, Mothers 200-2005: Traces of the Future (Japan: The Japan Foundation and Tankosha Publishing Co., 2005), p.122 150 impossible concept of being back with the recent dead yet the intense yearning to be with the dead person again fills the emptiness in our hearts. It is in this cavernous space where the dead live on in our hearts. The yearning gives way to the eternal, where the dead person can reside in this space for us as individuals for as long as we the bereaved want them to. The imprinting of the wearer, an ownership of a life passed can only be found in a used garment, never in a new one. This profound effect of imprinting memory on clothing had an effect on my papermaking, especially in making used paper over new paper. I wanted to recreate a tacit knowledge in my work. Imprinting someone’s physical memory had made me look at artwork and the experience of life and death in a new way. Endeavouring to bring this physical memory into my papermaking by imprinting memory from a wood block print onto the wet paper was quite unsuccessful. Once imprinted the resulting paper looked quite good, similar to embossing; however, when the paper dried, the imprinting, which had worked when wet, dried without the pattern remembered into the dried paper: it was as if it had not happened. Looking at film and repeating this experiment using time-lapse photography could incorporate time into the making. Ishiuchi likened the photographing her mother’s intimate clothing, to capturing a skin, which is ‘constantly defoliating and regenerating’.27 This skin of memory I was confident I could recreate in my papermaking. I was influenced by Ishiuchi’s work as it creates a new memory that is ‘present’ out of a lost memory. She owns the past, and by creating something new out of the old material makes an active, not a passive, memory of looking back, claiming the new series of photographs as her own. This action I found a positive and a creative method of working through grief, rarely articulated in such a sensitive manner. The physical presence of the absent mother recorded in the black and white photographs influenced my embodied materiality in my papermaking using tacit knowledge and memory to create new artefacts. It helped to answer my research questions on processing mourning using embodied materiality, and it was the recording of the process that confirmed that there is a physical element to mourning that needs to be processed. 27 Michiko Kashara essay in Ischiuchi, Miyako, Mothers 200-2005: Traces of the Future (Japan: The Japan Foundation and Tankosha Publishing Co., 2005), p.126 151 Ai Weiwei Ai Weiwei created the installation Straight (2008-12), with steel reinforcing bars; on the walls are pasted up the names of the Student Earthquake Victims found by the Citizens’ Investigation, 2008-11. This memorial that Ai Weiwei created is a profound mark of respect to the thousands of adults and children who died in an unreported earthquake in China, and was one of the major pieces in his exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, in April 2015. The lack of publicity from the Chinese government, neither reporting the accident nor recording the dead, who were forgotten, invisible, angered Ai. He recorded visiting the site and photographing the bent steel from the inadequately reinforced concrete buildings that had collapsed in the earthquake, killing thousands. Ai wrote in detail of how he collected the twisted steel rods secretly at night to reshape them into straight rods to re-make them as the installation. This example by Ai Weiwei, who publicly exhibited the hidden, the unrecorded earthquake accident, highlights the lack of public grief or memorial in this example and is politically motivated. Ai brings it to the attention of the world through public exhibition, describing the more positive attributes of the action of mourning, creating action in a memory that is present, from the tragedy of the past. The wall of names in Straight, recording these individuals whom the Chinese government had not recognised or reported as dead, was carefully labelled together with details of the victims, together with their ages, on the wall. The message was clear: these people had existed; now their lives were accounted for.28 There were 5,385 names on the wall.29 Ai Weiwei influenced my work particularly in this installation, as it demonstrates the vehicle for exhibiting something so traumatic, and so emotionally affecting. The housing for this public discussion has altered from the religious setting - the church, synagogue or cathedral - to the art gallery, where the mass public can be affected by something so serious portrayed through installation. I chose Ai Weiwei’s installation Straight as it answered my questions on display in my resarch and influenced my ideas in fragmentation, memorialising the existence of individuals who had lived, being displayed in the new space for 28 Ai Weiwei Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews and Digital Rants, 2006 -2009 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), p.150 29Ai Weiwei Straight (2008 -12) Royal Academy, London April 2015 152 discussing grief. The installation reminded me of the Pinkas synagogue in the old town of Prague, which has the names of over eighty thousand Jews from Czech and Moravia who were murdered during the Holocaust during World War 2, permanently painted on the walls. Richard Tuttle and Martha Tuttle In his early work Richard Tuttle makes work out of and on paper. Born in 1941, by 1964, he exhibited small hand-made paper cubes, Untitled (1964) was made from coated card paper, that could be picked up and interacted with by the public. The paper cubes were written about in Barbara Rose’s important essay defining minimal art, ‘ABC Art’, in Art in America, October 1965.30 Tuttle has been written about as a ‘post-minimalist’ artist. Tuttle enjoys language and poetry, and his wife is a well-known poet.31 His work is varied in media and includes outputs such as installation, sculpture, painting, textiles, drawing and printmaking. Tuttle has reflected on the fact as a child his mother was unable to look after him by herself so he was brought up by his aunt and helped by his grandmother. 32 He describes it was like having three mothers, but as having some confusion about who actually was his real mother. His father did not understand him, and his childhood was not particularly happy. He learnt to trust his own instincts in art, as he felt let down by teachers when he was very young. Tuttle has always made physical work, on both a small and large scale. After the series of paper cubes, he stuck cloth directly onto the wall, nearly a metre wide diagonally – it measured the span of the artists arm and related to the artist’s body.33 Being comfortable with fabric and textiles, Tuttle made his Cloth Pieces in 1967. Richard Tuttle believes it is an artist’s role to explore the world of nature and the emotions.34 Richard Tuttle works in the United States, Japan, India and Europe and has spent 30 Achim Borchardt-Hume, Richard Tuttle: I Don’t Know: The Weave of Textile Language (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), p.73-74 31 Tuttle recently wrote a poem (2017), for the papermaking charity, Dieu Donné Brooklyn, New York, who run courses in hand-made paper for the New York community and artists. 32 Interview with Richard Tuttle by Marc-Christoph Wagner,at Galleri Nicolai Wailner, Copenhagen [YouTube video], available at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=EEoZpS4AWLw [accessed 25 January 2018] 33 Achim Borchardt-Hume, Richard Tuttle: I Don’t Know: The Weave of Textile Language (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), p.75 34 Interview with Richard Tuttle by Marc-Christoph Wagner,at Galleri Nicolai Wailner, Copenhagen [YouTube video], available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEoZpS4AWLw [accessed 25 January 2018] 153 long periods travelling.35 Richard Tuttle’s early paper work has a resonance with my own papermaking; however, even more relevant is the work of his daughter, Martha Tuttle,36 who makes layers of paper and woven textiles in similar tonal shades with each other: and this acts as a painted canvas, such as in Grasses (2015) which looks like draped sculpture/painting. Martha Tuttle focuses on bringing craft skills into the art and design arena. Her weavings use hand-spun wool, which is beaten for hours with a mallet and is laid against the natural pigment-dyed thick paper, with added iron filings for added texture. I mention iron filings as I have used them in my papermaking, not quite as successfully as I would like the results to be, but worth persevering with. Martha Tuttle, like Rachel Whiteread, interrogates materials, and this interrogation of materials is demonstrated by Whiteread clearly in the recent retrospective exhibition of Whiteread’s work at Tate Britain (2017).37 Whiteread makes hand-made paper and lays it to dry on plastic corrugated roofing then peels it off like a mould, obtaining a ripple effect. The dialogue with material is part of questioning in research38 I have yet to explore moulds more deeply in my work, as I am still involved in exploring paper as a skin. The moulds are an area of research I would like to take forward in my practice work. Textiles and papermaking are often marginalised as a medium, not considered seriously in the art world.39 Art derived from the domestic, or emerging from the feminine, is seen as more as craft or outsider art than associated with a central city contemporary art gallery. This is also true to a certain extent of working in paper. Martha Tuttle sees this as a strength, saying: ’something that I really love about weaving and the processes that I use is that the places that I need to go and learn about them are outside the art world, and having that ability to go to back and forth between what people identify as ‘craft artists’ and ‘fine art artists’ – and of course that’s blurred all the time’.40 35 Achim Borchardt – Hume, Richard Tuttle: I Don’t Know: the Weave of Textile Language (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), p.77 36 Martha Tuttle (born 1989 in New Mexico graduated from MFA at Yale in 2015) 37 Ann Gallagher, Rachel Whiteread, (London: Tate Publishing Ltd., 2017), p.21 38 Ibid.,p.23 39 Critical reviews of Tuttle 2014, Tate Modern, Turner Contemporary, ‘Entangled’ 2017 such as Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times, Saturday October 11, 2014 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/ article/richard-tuttle-on-filling-the-turbine-hall-i-want-people-to-feel-like-theyre-in-heaven-x2jb- m09ls7z and Jonathan Jones, The Guardian Monday 13 October, 2014 https://www.theguardian. com/artanddesign/2014/oct/13/richard-tuttle-i-dont-know-the-weave-of-textile-language-review- tate-turbine-hall 40 ‘Martha Tuttle’, Jack Tilton Gallery, 2015, available at: http://www.jacktiltongallery.com/ artists/tuttle/ [accessed 30 December 2017] 154 Influenced by feminist historian Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s 1994 book Women’s Work: the First 20,000 Years, Martha Tuttle enjoys the fact that she can use the same technology today that was used to weave fibres thousands of years ago: ‘…they think weavings would serve as historical documents. So if you were getting news of a war it would be woven. But then that would suggest that women were the first historians’ Martha Tuttle’s work is the feminine counterpart to Richard Tuttle’s work: it crosses boundaries and in her words, ‘I had to found my own way in to it’ to the art world. ‘It is important to me to be able to touch every part of something that I make. I find that if I spend a long time with something, it heightens that relationship that I have with it’ I chose Richard Tuttle as a case study as his early work involved the use of paper for experimenting and testing new ideas. His paperwork resonated with my practice work as Richard Tuttle works with a high energy in creating artworks. Through examing his work, I found the work of his daughter, Martha Tuttle. The paper Martha Tuttle uses is dyed, folded, rubbed with soil: this manipulation makes her work unique, especially hung with the weavings draped on top in one, two or three layers, tonally dyed with natural pigment dyes. Martha Tuttle’s palette is reminiscent of the influence of Richard Tuttle’s lifelong friend Agnes Martin, through her washes and her subtle colour palette of similar tones. Martha Tuttle’s work resonated with my practice as she uses paper with textiles in her works. I was influenced by her work and included her in my case study of artistts as she works in a painterly way to express her concepts, using craft skills in fine art, the fine colour palette she uses influenced my research questions on materials, using paper and the familial relationships of continuity and the transformative through experimentation. 155 156 Fig 21, Hand-made sheet of paper CHAPTER 7 KNOWLEDGE IN THE WORK Consciously constraining the materials to paper helped me focus on the practice research, allowing for thought to flow through play to let the subconscious rise and take form1. As Marion Milner says: ‘The embodied encounter with materials is a medium enabling the meeting of conscious and unconscious selves’.2 Marchand understands that in craft, making knowledge using the body is a special and interactive social skill.3 Working with research within a project is making embodied knowledge, in itself unique using the physical body: ‘corpus’, as well as cognitive theory. In my project research, it involves the body and the knowledge in the hands. The process is not new; however, the outcomes are individual, they are unexpected. Physical and demanding on my hands to make, these ‘corporeal’ outcomes are used to form new works of art: for example the Fragmented Portrait series4 or Edge of Grief I, II and III,5 which endeavour to connote the awareness of complicated grief issues. Marchand looks at the progression from apprentice to expert, learning by doing.6 Artists own their work – their projects – discovering learning as individuals. In that sense, in the beginning of my research I also was an apprentice to the making of paper, and now have mastered a competency and own the work exhibited. The skill of the hand conveys the language of the work through the sensitivity of the hand and body.7 The hand retains the tacit knowledge of the resulting product; the knowledge builds in the hand. The symbolic is discussed, through the hand, in the work; the intimacy in the work is created by the hand. From this knowledge, I can make new research in paper and in the small sculptures I make from paper clay. Craft has a provenance; the maker and the provenance of the materials is evident. The view is connected with the person: who made the piece, and with which materials. Interest in craft practice and ideas has been raised by recent competitions. The Loewe Foundation’s Craft Prize (which builds on the long-standing Loewe Foundation International Poetry Prize), focusing on the work of international craft practitioners, was launched in 2016. This prestigious international competition is open to traditional as well as contemporary craft 1 Carl G. Jung, Collected Works: Vol. 15, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966) p.34 2 Marion Milner A Life of One’s Own (London: Routledge, 2011), p.146 3 Trevor H.J. Marchand, The Masons of Djenné (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009) p.6 4 Fig 5 Hanging by a Thread Jules Findley 2015, 2017 5 Fig 6 Edge of Grief I, II and III Jules Findley, 2015 6 Marchand, Trevor, ‘Trevor Marchand on Craft’, audio interview with Nigel Warburton, Social Science Space (January 21, 2015), http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2015/01/trevor- marchand-on-craft/ last [accessed 27 August, 2017] 7 See Chapter 2 p.25 157 practitioners, and the entries are exhibited internationally. One of the finalists exhibited in Tokyo 2017 was Kristina Rothe, who makes imprinted urns from hemp paper.8 Is the return to the impact of the physical and the retention of the tacit knowledge of making the reason for the reinvigorated interest in craft and the work of the artisan through the eyes of a new generation? In 2017, the resurgence of interest in craft in the United Kingdom was reflected in the establishment of the BBC Woman’s Hour Craft Prize, won by ceramic artist Phoebe Cummings;9 the work of the finalists was exhibited at the V&A Museum, London. In other national countries, craft is part of the land, the country’s heritage. This then raises ethical questions about who owns craft, in terms of heritage. There are elemental factors used in my work, such as fire and water, which leaves a residue of ash, which can be used in ritual or as a method to create individual pieces. Using the ash, collected from the burnings of relevant items, I am able to paint on to the paper I have made, which gives more meaning to my work. The paper is sized with milk, (symbolically maternal) and milk is used to make the ash into paint. In the United Kingdom, we have lost most of our ‘traditional’ funeral rites, most of which were established during the Victorian era. There is no adopted symbol we can wear at work to let people know that today may be an anniversary or a significant day of mourning so that colleagues can address others with sympathy and compassion. Cremation ceremonies are twenty minutes in length; the return to work is imminent. Compassionate leave is not a statutory right in the United Kingdom, but most medium to large employers have some arrangements in place for absence during bereavement. In complicated grief, compassionate leave is discretionary. In disenfranchised grief, permission is probably not granted from the workplace, unless the bereavement is ‘seen’. The connection of bereavement with mental health issues is clear. The conceptual nature of memory allows preservation, but also allows the author to let go, like the photographic work of Ishiuchi, not just recording but owning the work, making new memories from old. The silence of the makers’ familiarity with their process is unlike the explicit technique of the engineer or technician. The silence of embodied knowledge is analogous to other silenced knowledges. In this research, I aim to trace the affinities between silenced grief and silence of ‘tacit’ knowledge of the artist and artisan. Each is subjective and different, and as personal as a thumbprint, iris scan or DNA trace. 8 Kristina Rothe, graduated in textiles, learnt papermaking from paper artist and lighting designer Helmut Frerick, Charrus France http://www.kristinarothe.com/cv http://helmut-frerick.com/fr/ 9 Alumni of University of Brighton, 3D Design & Crafts undergraduate course. 158 Hand-made paper and emotions In complicated grief, in relation to tearing paper and tears, I suggest that tears are not necessarily filled just with sadness: they can be bitter tears of grief, fear, anger, shame and guilt. Morgan10 discusses Freud, who thought that guilt was the dominant emotion in grief; however. after many decades he argued that shame has replaced guilt, especially in Western societies, due to the way that guilt and shame are discussed: ‘Guilt is thought to be focused on a specific behaviour or action, while shame is thought to be aimed globally at the whole self.’11 Morgan12 maintains that shame is a more pervasive emotion than guilt, saying: ‘as an expression of one’s sense of having failed to be the person one wants to be’, when it comes to development and identity’.13 In bereavement, these unwanted emotions have a habit of rising to the surface, as families’ unresolved grief from the past emerges to wreck the lives of the recently bereaved in their raw state, and the loss becomes tied in with other family emotions and memories. There is the loss of love, abandonment, the lost person, but what is painful to the adult/child/infant is the loss of a relationship. Freud describes as ‘cathexis’ everything that we as humans ‘invest’ into a relationship with an object, which can be lost. This investment is all of our love, hopes, expectations, security, identity, and values. The absence of the object is the absence of part of the self (psyche) that is activated by the object. Once the natural maternal attachment has been broken, the loss of a child, baby or lover to the maternal self cannot be easily healed or restored; it becomes an emotional wound. This makes a living loss harder to bear: without the finding of the person, or their remains, no closure can be made. It is a seeping, dripping wound that has spillage around it, and it leaks. Temporality in the work Marchand, like Kristeva, values the ‘meta’ and where it sits within practice, recognising and valuing change. Practice generates knowledge and reflection. ‘Meta’ is in my work through metaphor; Kristeva14 observes the metaphorical object of love through the metonymic object of desire, the Ancient Greek philosophy of Eros versus Thanatos.15 The unfired bodies eventually disintegrate, body parts fall off, the process of returning to dust begins, and the portraits will eventually fade in the liminal. 10 Michael L. Morgan, On Shame (New York: Routledge, 2008) p.37 11 Ibid. 12 Michael L. Morgan, On Shame, (New York: Routledge, 2008) p.38 13 Janette Fuller, Are Guilt and Shame in Male Forensic Patients Linked to Treatment Motivation and Readiness? ((Unpublished Doctor of Psychology thesis, University of Surrey, 2017) 14 Kelly Oliver, Ed. ‘The Portable Kristeva’ (New York, Chichester West Sussex, Columbia University Press, 1997) p.144 15 Thanatology being the study of death 159 My Contribution to Knowledge Presentation methods, in Evidence through Evidence through anticipating people’s state of Research: Practice: mind in formal dissemination Feedback suggests Repetition in Paper as Symbolic, as a rite in public are keen to stilling the mind itself used in burials and is interact with more Making paper is relevant today subject specific work mindful in ritual dealing with Metaphors in Practice methods and bereavement and loss, textiles and paper domesticity - the home is a which includes all sorts are the same place of comfort of complicated losses The hand and including gender, making The hand and repetition in parents, trauma, abuse making paper is as important as in knitting especially in grief Fig 3 Diagram to illustrate the contribution to knowledge from practice research. Each part of research and practice informs each other – Jules Findley 160 Grief is multi-dimensional: one size does not fit all. Working with grief using elemental ideas has been revealing: there are many different types of grief, interpretation of grief is personal, and can be difficult. The pain of grief is hidden: it cannot be seen unless we know more intimate details about the person, if they choose to reveal it. Like any loss, it is a passage of time with a journey of empathy and compassion, and some people are unable to feel these emotions. The excruciating pain of a living loss is never far from my own journey, and personally I have no idea if it will heal or not: like those grieving without a body, complicated grief is a humbling experience. Grief gives sense to an important part of our psyche that understands mourning work and mental processes. In papermaking as touch is important: paper is a sensory material, like skin: ‘even the visual perceptions are fused and integrated into the haptic continuum of self’.16 This research aims to contribute to knowledge of the creative process in three main ways: In connecting the idea of repetition with pedagogical aspects of teaching through workshops, experimental research and outputs using hand-made paper making techniques, is a fundamental area of using the cognitive processes with the hand and making skills using repetition of process. Students learn more deeply being involved in lecturer research and being able to participate in workshops together, in a collaborative practice. The students went on to develop individual sketchbooks and further their own individual research work. There was a silent, magic transitive space between lecturer/ workshop artisan and student, where unquantifiable amounts of knowledge transferred, from me to the students and vice versa through a transitional space, a ‘meta’. Observing the student’s own research and practice in making paper, each student’s learning is different; my own methodology is unique and contributes to tacit knowledge, silent, unseen until the outcomes are made explicit. There is a pattern of what is inferred through grief and interpretation; grief needs to be expelled from the body in order for the bereaved to move on. In pedagogic practice, student’s need to produce work in order to develop knowledge, to share what is produced using ‘meta’ in transformation, in the same way grief if shared helps it to be dispelled. Secondly, in making this research I recognise that hand-made paper can be symbolic and have symbolic potential.17 Through the investigations and 16 Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘The Eyes of The Skin: Architecture and the Senses’ (Chichester, John Wiley & Sons 3rd Edition, 2012), p.12 17 See Chapter 5 161 162 Fig 26, Fragmented portrait sewn with pink sheet paper with ash 21grams experimentations in Chapter 5, paper is as relevant today in Western culture as it is in Chinese culture, with a culture in papermaking that goes back thousands of years. Making the connection with the physical as well as the mental aspects of grief as well as repetitive actions is an important dual aspect for having a healthy mourning. My research has implications for more socially constructed forms of mental well-being. The physical activity of repeating, and using the whole body to make and repeat the making is often overlooked. Mourning ‘work’ is not static, and not just given to mindfulness, as there are emotions such as anger and rage, which are dispelled more easily through physical work. Although this research is not about art therapy, there is the question of whether an artist can derive personal rehabilitation from trauma through the process of creative work, and whether the artworks may be of use to anyone other than the artist themselves. There are other questions of differences between art, craft and design disciplines, which raise more questions at the integration of these different practices. The maternal body contains the unborn child inside the skin. If grief is mishandled, it performs like a bandage18 for the wound, not properly adhered the bandage will fall off, paper acts as the ‘distributed agency’ for skin. ‘Wound’ is the Anglo Saxon word for the Greek word trauma, the commencement of a rupture, dislocation, or fragmentation of a continuous surface or environment. The concept of trauma or wound is the point of origin for the experience of affects of grief, rage, denial and pain, and the experience of these in the process of mourning. This is the fundamental contribution that my research aims to make to the understanding of the structure and components of the creative process. My research project can claim to have explored the similarities between the process of materialising emotion and the process of an embodied encounter with materials. The conceptual nature of memory allows preservation, but also allows the author to let go, seen in the photographic work of Ishiuchi, not just recording but owning the work, making new work from old, familiar memories and moving forward in grief. The silence of the makers’ familiarity with their process is unlike the explicit technique of the engineer or technician. The silence of embodied knowledge is analogous to other silenced knowledges. In this research, I aim to trace the affinities between silenced grief and the silence of ‘tacit’ knowledge of the artist and artisan. Each is subjective and different, and as personal as a thumbprint, iris scan or DNA trace. In materialisation I am giving voice to a muted experience. If grief and mourning are silenced are socially and culturally silence by social conventions, politeness, denial there is an opportunity to change through the embodied materiality and in the making. 18 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p.281 163 Interment is more than a physical concept: at death we inter the relationships we had with the deceased, which is the loss we feel. Lives are intermingled with loss and burial at all sorts of levels. I have highlighted the fact that there needs to be more discussion from the research and further research in complicated grief, particularly in maternal loss. There are many aspects to mourning which are difficult and unexplored; I have only had a chance to touch on some of them. A healthy mourning is related to how strong our attachment bonds are19 in existing and past family bonds, individually and generationally. In complicated grief, there is often post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In difficult trauma cases this can manifest as complicated post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD),20 and needs specialist help. I have not researched this much-needed area, due to restrictions in time: however, I would like to when time allows. The UK government has acknowledged, as reported in July 2017, that research shows that the creative industries contribute in a beneficial way to mental health:21this has positive implications for funding in this area. Papermaking is a fundamental aspect of what is known as ‘fiber arts’ in the United States, and textile art in the United Kingdom, but it is not taught as a matter of course in art and design courses in the UK. Paper work has a direct relevance to textiles and to contemporary textile meshes and fibres.22 Paper can be used in types of performance work and in a technological context can have more potential as a fabric or future fabric.23 It has a potential part to play in sustainable design practice, generating something new out of something old: the fields of textiles and fashion, and the plastics industry now urgently considering the ethics of the circular economy. Papermaking is taught on art courses in USA, China and Japan. 19 John Bowlby, ‘Attachment and Loss: Volume 3 Loss: Sadness and Depression’ [1980](Random House Group Ltd Pimlico 1998), p.45 20 See Glossary in the Appendix for terms 21House of Commons, ‘The Arts: Health Effects’ Hansard Online, 11 October 2017 https:// hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2017-10-11/debates/8119716E-5D7C-4FC8-870B- 7F1C2B7D4F09/TheArtsHealthEffects [accessed 30 December, 2017] 22 See Chapter 5 and Chapter 8 23 Katie Ryder, and Nicholas Morley, ‘Pulp Fiction? Re-innovation of Paper Manufacture from Textiles’, Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture, 10.2 (2012), 238-247 p.240 164 CHAPTER 8 CONCLUSION AND NEXT STEPS My research in materialising mourning from complicated grief has shown that there are many nuances of grief, and many different forms of grief in the landscape of grief and mourning. It is the experimentation with materials that are fundamental, and that forms the bridge between art, craft and design. Whereas design tends towards engineering and control, craft tends towards the display of dexterity and skill: the work of the experimental artist does not seek its meaning in these definitions of ‘success’. It is the way that the art process may be illustrative of other tacit knowledge, such as mourning, that is the focus of this research project. The process by which this can be discovered is through a personal journey and a respect for subjective, sometimes unconscious, knowledge. When making The Curtain of Loss (2012), in manipulating the volume of fabric I was aware of the grief individuals suffered at the loss of their loved ones. By the time I was making paper from used materials in 2015, I was much more conscious of the fragility and the nuances of a myriad of different emotions connected with loss and bereavement. It was as if I had learnt a new language, and the depths of compassion had expanded on many different levels. The making had surpassed words in some cases in the artwork, and was expressing itself in the ‘being’ instead. This finding was somewhat surprising to me at first, but the feeling of the artwork being a strength was a really powerful one, and one that I was excited to develop through my research. This research is by project and is an investigation into the complex relationship between the affect of complicated grief through experimentation and the process of creative practice. The emotional experience of loss and mourning is explored through an intellectual and cultural perspective, as well as through the series of experiments that constitute the practice-led aspect of the research. I could not have learned this by creative practice alone. Throughout the process I have been motivated to discover as much as possible of what has been thought and said about grief and mourning, and also about the creative process. The literature review is neither comprehensive nor exhaustive, as this is a universal experience and one that is becoming increasingly recognised as important. Research from sociology, history and psychology is as important to me as research from creative arts theories. Townsend argues that death is not always the end, but sometimes the beginning, in culture: ‘Death establishes the necessity of meaning and knowledge as concepts, yet, imagined as limit, it is not a law that defines limit and ending; as a concept of absolute termination it endlessly initiates beginnings’.1 1 Christopher Townsend, Art and Death (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008), p.2 165 The project is an exploration using the processes of making by hand, and have specifically developed tacit knowledge in the area of grief through the connotation of affect in hand-made paper. Hands are a powerful manifestation of creativity, and I wanted to consciously allow the work to lead me in the direction of creativity. In the discussion of methodological issues the differences between ‘art’ and ‘design’ research traditions are analysed through the work, leading to the conclusion that each implies a different relation of subject and intentionality. The theories of affect, loss and mourning enable me to better understand the complexity of the hand, and its capacities for holding and handling within the creative process. Through the approaches that are characteristic of art and craft, I designed a series of experiments that reveal, in the embodied encounter with materials, the complexity of the manifestation of affect within the creative process. Confining my materials to a paper-based enquiry has helped to frame the project and focus my aim of exploring the complexities of emotion within the materials. This project evidences one of the conclusions that affect influences both the material and the designed object, and affect, like materials, forms a bridge between art and design. Since commencing this research in October 2012, society has changed rapidly. In the UK, the social conventions which shape the rites and rituals of mourning and the public manifestation of grief versus traditional funeral rites, both in the UK and globally, are in a state of flux, as a younger generation, influenced by travel, film, mass media and the internet, reject traditional rites. Through ongoing government initiatives on death and bereavement, groups such as Dying Matters,2 which organises an annual awareness week, and the Liverpool Care Pathway3 initiatives from the late 1990s to 2014, death and bereavement are now better understood than ever before in England and Wales. Complicated grief and ideas of attachment have not been well researched, however; there is a distinct lack of funding for research in areas which can affect the mental health of the community, particularly the consideration of mothers in mourning and the long-term effects of grief. Alexander Faulkner Shand concludes: ‘The nature of sorrow is so complex, its effects in different characters so various, that it is rare, if not impossible, for any writer to show an insight into all of them’ 4 2 ‘Dying Matters’ is a government initiative to raise awareness of dying, death and bereavement http://www.dyingmatters.org/AwarenessWeek 3 NHS: Choices ‘News Analysis: What is the Liverpool Care Pathway?’ 27 November, 2012, updated, 19 January, 2015 https://www.nhs.uk/news/medical-practice/news-analysis-what-is-the- liverpool-care-pathway/ 4 Alexander Faulkner Shand, The Foundations of Character (London: Macmillan, 1920) p.361 166 The aim of the research is to prove that the concept of affect and the processes of display are necessary interventions, validated through public tragedy or maternal loss. Whereas the point of display and exhibition is often a goal for the artist, for the researcher it is the research method and the outcomes of the research. As described by Shand, the landscape of grief is vast, and certainly needs exploration. Least understood is complicated grief. Whilst taking into account Shand’s statement about the impossibility of generalised analyses of grief,5 the research project intends to demonstrate some ways in which mourning manifests itself in creative practice. Cultural conventions that have traditionally relegated expressions of grief to private or silent spaces are now explored as a space of shared, social, communal and cultural experience. This idea is especially valuable, in my view in the experience of ‘complicated grief’. In investigating complicated grief, the research aims to bring the concept of affect and the process of display to the methodological debate of arts research. My project proposes that in the art practice process there exists a data of emotional articulation, which, when shared through discussion, and especially display, can make a vital contribution to the cultural acknowledgement of grief and mourning. Despite these boundaries, the research in many ways has been life-changing in terms of the realisation of how little research exists on affect, together with complicated grief. Display and arenas for the public to discuss and interact with art that provokes affect are clearly much needed. Not necessarily experiential, the opportunity to discuss public feeling, dispelling rage, processing sorrow and grief, promoting reparation, can all be made through the exhibition of sensitive work, helping others to express their bereavement where perhaps they could not before. The making of artefacts in this research project explores meaning to make sense of the complex emotional experiences of complicated grief through artists’ use of materials and forms of display. These are understood as complex communications within and between subjects. Neither ‘art therapy’ nor a psychobiography of art and artists, this research identifies closely with a movement sometimes described as ‘the affective turn’6 that extends throughout the ontology, ethics, social sciences, aesthetics, politics and the arts. The artwork in this research is a form of action. The methodological study notes that a post-Freudian approach to art proposes that the work of mourning and the work of art are parallel and interconnected. My work in creative practice 5 Alexander Faulkner Shand, The Foundations of Character (London: Macmillan, 1920) p.361 6 The affective turn designates a shift in explanatory paradigm that was initiated with postmodernism and post-Marxist politics, as a response to the hyper-rationalisation of analytic methods and theories in the twentieth century. 167 forms a bridge, with materials and art becoming a way of giving voice to the unspoken, the untold, the invisible, the unseen and therefore ignored shadow of art; but no less importantly the art explores the raw dissolution of relations, of relationships formed and dissolved, fading but near the surface, not forgotten. Repetition in practice stills the mind: creating a process, a reparative narrative, which is a material matter happens internally and then externally. The emotions can be explored by tangibly working through the emotions with the papermaking and the outcomes. The process of working in this research demonstrates how working with embodied materials can realise complicated and often unspoken affect. Language, the currency of most social interaction, can act as a lever in abstraction, internally through cognitive processes, direct mapping into the external, explicit embodied making. The process of art, when shared through cultures of display, brings materials into the act of communication. Language and grief become ingredients, together with affect, which, together with the embodiment of materials can be like skin: skin is double-sided, the internal and the external, and in a similar way paper can have an external side and an internal side, and one or both of these can be absorbent. From making new hand-made paper to making paper as found material, the journey moved forward towards the use of paper clay as a moulding material. During this time the use of the hands as the embodied encounter with the material became more important than the more disembodied relationship to the paper through the medium of machines. The paper clay could have been shaped using moulds, as the acrylic resin was poured into a mould to contain the objects it memorialised; however, in this iteration the clay was moulded by hand, the repetitive action producing a small 4-inch individual figure. The hand proved significant in a number of ways: The hand determined the scale of the works The hand determined the shape of the works The hand was present as a means of manifesting the absent relationship of ‘holding’ and ‘handling’ The hand conveyed the language that words could not The hand conveys the symbolic potential in the paper Paper clay is an industrially produced material that uses recycled wood and textile fibre in a medium with a high water content. The liquid can be evaporated at room temperature, or the material can be fired in a kiln. 168 The paper clay continues to be used for this ongoing work. The use of organic plant fibres has traditionally been used in papermaking. Through display the process of this materialisation of affect is communicated, potentially with others. Then the material may be again decomposed into its constituent elements and recomposed into new iterations. This process is alchemical in its capacity to symbolise the transformation of ‘base’ elements into ‘pure’ elements – ‘old’ elements into ‘new’ elements, the inchoate anger and rage of mourning into the acceptance of loss and renewal. Julia Kristeva writes of affect as a communicative process: ‘the ‘sublime’ object dissolves in raptures of a bottomless memory…remembrance to remembrance, love to love,…’7 The material process is understood by Kristeva as a symbolic process in which language or meaning is generated as a combination ratio between ‘symbolic’ and ‘semiotic’ codes. ‘Mother and death, both abominated, abjected, slyly build a victimising and persecuting machine in which I become subject of the Symbolic as well as Other of the Abject.’8 The Symbolic is the denotative and ‘thetic’ dimension of meaning, such as is contained in nouns and naming. The ‘semiotic’ code is the pattern that attributes meaning to all non-rational elements of language, such as rhythm, volume, texture, rhyming and prose, and the meaning of any text is determined by the ratio of the one to the other. Kristeva9 cites the distinctive style of the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, quoting a sentence from his semi-autobiographical novel Journey to the End of the Night that relates to grief: ‘that grief of hers;…but it came back into her throat, her grief did, and tears came too, and she began all over again’.10 Instructive or explanatory texts have a high ratio of symbolic to semiotic codes, whereas poetic texts inversely foreground the semiotic over the symbolic. For Kristeva, there is ‘revolution’ in the semiotic language of the poetic. Kristeva’s case studies of written texts can be used as a paradigm for the creative practice of materials. The form of the solid paper also carries meaning through the specificity and randomness of its edges that delineate its solid state. Kristeva, in the context of a speech on a work of art, writes: ‘a symbolic configuration absorbs and replaces forgiveness as emotional impulse…anthropomorphic compassion’.11 7 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection (New York; Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1982), p.12 8 Ibid., p.112 9 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection (New York; Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1982), Ch10, p.192 10 Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night [1932], trans. Ralph Manheim, (Richmond: Alma Classics, 2012), p.275 11 Julia Kristeva , Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia [1941]) (New York; Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1989), p.214 169 For a long time rituals and religions have been the traditional and institutional spaces for the manifestations and experience of mourning and loss. Wherever or whichever is the deity, sacred element of the god, in religion the believer is never lost and in their belief never a lost love. Art has become a secular version of what is traditionally ascribed to religion, which is not new but more apparent in our present society. Art reveals or frames the emotions of relationships with materials or human thoughts and materials and memories of material experience with other human beings, including the maternal. Examples of contemporary global art galleries, enormous structures such as Tate Modern, London, designed by world-leading architects, have become the new cathedrals for viewing and discussing controversial and difficult subjects. Tate Modern has a gallery filled with the work of Louise Bourgeois, filled with her objects consisting of different materials.12 Materials are the bridge between designers and artists, Sheela Gowda writes: ‘Proximity to the material defines the formal aspects of the work and its tangibility’. 13 Paper is transformative. The power of Bourgeois’ work comes from the way that she, as a modernist artist, claims the space traditionally given to religion as the space for art. The rituals of her creative practice become infused with the ritualisations that have enabled religion to ‘contain’ the social manifestations of grief, pain and mourning. This bid to enable secular art, the spaces of modernity, to offer manifestation of the unspoken and difficult realities of affective life, is very ambitious and courageous. It is, in Kristeva’s terms, ‘revolutionary’. As a material, a fabric, paper provides a platform for engagement with the expression of grief, and the paper itself can be created through many different papermaking processes, using the metaphor to express these emotions. The absorption properties of paper make the techniques symbolic, and is mysterious in its development, as if it has its own tongue. Paper sits within the language of textiles: even though my research work is art rather than design, the fabric of paper has a textile provenance. In this sense, when educational austerity creates pressure to close textile art courses that use materials such as wool and silk – felt, tapestry and weave, and clay and porcelain – ceramics and glass, with the techniques and tacit experience learned from traditional craft movements using the hand, making paper lies in this area of textile art as a means and form of expression, as a fundamental area of material. The art in making paper is like a language; it is unique, similar to a mute body that cannot speak. It absorbs the experiences of life, behaves as skin, and portrays the affect of mourning. Paper is a substrate and an ethnographic metaphor for what is buried and the strata of emotional knowledge, 12 See Chapter 5 13 Sheela Gowda, writes on her installation of human hair, Behold (2009) ‘Tate Modern: Materials and Objects’, Tate Gallery, available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/display/ materials-and-objects/sheela-gowda [accessed 30 January, 2017] 170 consciousness and materiality. Papermaking by hand is an iterative process, which produces a tangible new outcome; through manipulation the raw material transforms into a sensorial experience, with synergistic potential. The terms ‘material’, ‘matter’ and ‘mother’ share a common etymology; a mother can understand in every material what is inherent to a mother in loss; the relationship with the material matter, which has emotional memory and meaning: Igoe states that ‘textiles is a Mother’.14 Working with used material, or adding material through making, paper becomes changed, a process of transformation. Immersing fabric in water and taking it out is a process of rebirth, re-emergence, re-generating: the re-emergence into the world after period and the ‘work’ of mourning. All parents grieve for the loss of a child, however the aspect of the maternal and the feminine is also a metaphor for the way that all affect in Western culture is considered irrational and feminine. The body, inputs Cartesian culture which is ‘animal’ and is feminised. It is associated with children, slaves, working class rather than cerebral, rational and transcendental. My research brings the facts of affect to the fore, through materialising the emotions in the papermaking process; this makes the unspeakable visible through its materiality and thus changes our relationship to one another through embodied materiality, answers the research question and is why paper is Symbolic. Using tried techniques from Schön’s ideas on reflectiveness, identifying differences in types of reflection: reflection-on-action, reflection on the knowledge from past experiments and reflection-in-action, the spontaneous questioning the idea of assumption of knowledge at the time of experimentation allowed the creative knowledge in my experimentation to be meaningful analytical, critical and original. Schön writes: ‘…when we reject the traditional view of professional knowledge, recognising that practitioners may become reflective researchers in situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and conflict, we have recast the relationship between research and practice. For on this perspective, research is an activity for practitioners. It is triggered by features of the practice situation, undertaken on the spot, and immediately linked to action… the exchange between research and practice is immediate, and reflection-in-action is its own implementations’.15 Deeper reflective activity on some of the project work would have allowed further outcomes and more work from the many ideas that grew out of grief. Reflection-in-action, however, in my experimentation allowed for immediate adaptation and continuous reflection whilst working with a practice that enabled and helped my writing enormously: the two went hand in hand. 14 Elaine Igoe, In Textastis: Matrixial Narratives of Textile Design (Unpublished PhD thesis, Royal College of Art, 2013), p.78 15 Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professional Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p.308-309 171 Reflection on the Research Question In reflection of my research question of materialising mourning, there are still many areas to be discussed concerning fragmentation, fragility, paper, liquidity and the maternal in respect to complicated grief. The mother erased and eliminated from their family is a type of grief little explored or raised in public society. Kristeva writes on abjection as: ‘a kind of narcissistic crisis: it is witness to the ephemeral aspect of the state called “narcissism” with reproachful jealousy, …16’ There have been no recent studies on disorganised grief or disordered mourning. Whilst this is part of attachment theory, it is a subject area under researched.17 Reflecting on the research I have made so far, I would like to further my research in psychological theory with practice, by applying to a family centred research area in order to carry out these disordered mourning and maternal grief. The research on paper and grief has led me to this point and on the verge of new possibilities. I have let the work travel and followed in its wake trying to record and make sense of the path it has left behind. Kristeva quotes Freud, ‘where pain is born out of an excess of fondness and a hate that, refusing to admit the satisfaction it also provides, is projected towards an other.’18 It raises attachment issues already researched from Bowlby and Ainsworth, and examines the idea of coercive control in domestic violence, and of disorganised grief also found in mourning. Fragmentation and materialising paper came about by the learning about the process of hand-making paper itself: hand-made paper has a craftsmanship, an artisanal quality, that is highly valued in many cultures, presently undervalued in Western clutures. Paper crafts such as marbling, folding, origami and surface decoration are popular craft activities, as well as providing artisanal employment but these are not the reasons for the research. The research work is not aiming for skilled artisanal craftsmanship but for an encounter with the elemental processes of transformation between composition and decomposition of particles and their medium. Exploring the processes of papermaking by hand, the alchemical, irrational significance of the process became the research. Could this be the silent dialogue with the mystery in making? Paper is a fundamental material: versatile, organic, sustainable and yet a fragile, fragmented, crushable, foldable, deteriorating, memorable substance, which can absorb, unfold, disintegrate, retain memory, similar to cloth and the emotions carried within it. Textile processes of unravelling and unfolding in both cloth 16 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection (New York; Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1982), p.14 17 John Bowlby, ‘Attachment and Loss: Volume 3 Loss: Sadness and Depression’ [1980] (Random House Group Ltd Pimlico 1998), p.36 18 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection (New York; Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1982), p.60, 172 and paper are well-established material conductors of our passage in life. Cloth and paper retain memory, and yet both can be shredded, torn, as can humans: immortal, temporal, liminal. The potential of paper to be used as a medium of containment or holding of added materials such as earth, fragments of detritus, plants, memorabilia, was explored through both reading and practice. Edges, especially the rough, uneven edge of the deckle and then the hand-torn edge, became the focus of my research into the emotional unease in mourning, and were a direct contrast to the clean, industrially cut edges made by machine in manufacturing finished paper. Paper made from plant fibre and made into ‘new’ paper is different to the paper, which is remade from shredded paper; the use of that paper has changed. Re-making ‘old’ paper onto new is shredding already-made paper and the existing materials may retain the history, stains and traditions. Exploring the process of papermaking by hand, the alchemical, irrational, significance of the process became the research. Could this be the silent dialogue with the mystery in making? The way that solid materials are dissolved and suspended in liquid before being sieved on mesh substrates that enable the solid to be separated from the liquid is a process which is especially relevant to my research. Not only is the transformation of a formless liquidity into a form of solidarity intrinsically meaningful, it also connotes the transformation of affect as a fluid and transient experience into more ‘formed’, fixed, residual structures of the self. Liquidity is frequently used by poets as a metaphor for grief. The ‘frozen’ affect of pain, and the ‘fog’ of depression are cited by Winnicott as metaphors for psychological states of mind19 drew me to my research question. The transformative potential of the solution and dissolution of solid matter through liquid suspension was significant in these experiments. The unexpectedness, serendipity, suspension of judgment and use of play in the randomness of the consistency that emerged at the end of the process had the same effect as the revelation of a dark-room image on photographic paper. It symbolised the way the process of renewal exists in a way that functions beyond the intentionality of the maker. The papers’ edges fascinated me in that these manifested the new boundaries and borders of a form that was emerging out of a process of dissolution and transformation. In effect, there would be no ‘end’ to the process, as each emergent output is only one stage in a process of continual transformation. The sculptures and artefacts exhibited at specific moments enter into another circuit of exchange and communication. The processes of these methods enabled me to materialise and answer fragmentation through 19 Donald Winnicott, The Child, The Family, and the Outside (Cambridge MA: Da Capo Press, 1964), p.17 173 Story board demonstrating impact of work from public with Fig 37, Fig 33, Fig 40 174 the physical as well as the reading of academic texts to answer my research questions of embodied materiality. The practice research has been successful in raising areas of delicate subjects for discussion of affect through installations in the public domain, highlighting the fragile and fragmented mental states of grief, unseen. I am interested in paper in thinking metaphorically as skin-to-skin research using hand-made paper, and interaction through future technological processes. The research can carry forward through exhibition and conferences where such installations are welcome. The making has proved to be valuable experience both in feeding back to me, creating research, and creating something new out of old, discarded paper, detritus that could have been thrown away. This resonates with encapsulating the resin around personal clutter left after bereavement, often classified as junk and thrown away, and yet the very memory of the personal possessions of the deceased would be there in the mess of it all. In making paper the essence of the person was also there from the used and re-made into the reused, especially when using paint in the reuse. In working out ideas of practice, sometimes the timings of research into the grief theories progress at a different pace to the practice: for example, through complicated grief not only is there absence, but often guilt and shame. The practice has only recently caught up with the response to shame in a meaningful manner. These are the newly made figures, the bodies of Shame (2017), following Without a Body (2015), which discuss a living loss. If feelings of guilt and shame are not addressed in complicated grief, these emotions can become toxic shame, if shame is suppressed. Often the conversations around the circumstances in traumatic death are silenced. Emotional support through complicated grief is very necessary to prevent long, protracted mourning, when reparation may never occur. Through pioneering the methodology and the ideas of activism there is much to do using materials in textile art and the feminine with affect and display to achieve social and material change. The work concludes with two propositions. The first is that all creative practice is connected to subjective processes of grief, mourning and reparation. The second, more enigmatic, is that all losses evoke, in some complex, enfolded way, the first ontological loss of the subject’s first object of attachment. 175 Bibliography: Abrams, Rebecca, When Parents Die: Learning to Live with a Loss of a Parent, 2nd. edn. 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A Selection of Published Papers 191 APPENDIX 1 GLOSSARY of Terms CAFCASS or Cafcass stands for Children and Family Court Advisory Support Service that represents children in family court cases in England and Wales. https://www.cafcass.gov.uk/ DSM Diagnostic and Statistical Manual now on version 5 – DSM-5, or DSM-V came into use in 2013, previous versions were DSM-4, or DSM-IV, DSM-3 or DSM-III etc. https://dsm.psychiatryonline.org/doi/book/10.1176/appi. books.9780890425596 APA American Psychiatric Association:https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/ practice/dsm ICG Index for Complicated Grief devised by Prigerson et al, 1995 – now superseded by PGI http://www.apa.org/pi/about/publications/caregivers/ practice-settings/assessment/tools/complicated-grief.aspx PGI Prolonged Grief Index incorporating Prolonged Grief Disorder http:// journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000121 PG-13 Thirteen items of heightened risk bereaved have to stress and dysfunction https://endoflife.weill.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/pg-13.pdf PTGD Post Traumatic Grief Disorders https://www.cambridge.org/core/ journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/consensus-criteria-for-traumat- ic-grief/CB5301ED7A8476AD00C610146529DA7C PTSD Post Traumatic Stress Disorders https://www.mind.org.uk/ information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/post-traumatic-stress-dis- order-ptsd/#.WmbiLJOFiqA CPTSD Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder https://www.ptsd.va.gov/ professional/PTSD-overview/complex-ptsd.asp CRT or ‘Controlled Randomised Testing’ has been considered the prototype for all researchers. MDD Major Depressive Disorder DABDA Kübler Ross stages of Dying DRS The Design Research Society holds a biannual international conference in a different city/country each year. https://www.designresearchsociety.org/ cpages/home 192 Dying Matters A government initiative to help make death, dying and bereavement awareness in the UK, and reduce the stigma of death and bereavement. They produce annual initiatives in the UK. Available at: http:// www.dyingmatters.org/AwarenessWeek Princess Pleater A hand built pleater machine, originally made for smocking and embroidery. It is a contraption using rollers with many needles which thread fabric and other materials at the same time. Available at https://www. princess-pleaters.co.uk/ In China, where papermaking is known to have started thousands of years ago, it is traditional to see paper as a means of holding, and keeping precious materials such as meteorite of fragments, flowers, fabrics. In my workshops the capacity of handmade paper to offer forms for subjective experience was investigated. 193 APPENDIX 2 DAR Residence in September 2017 Conversation Overseas, Jules Findley with Linda Duvall: 1-30 September 2017 The forced Child Migration Programme was about thousands of young children who were sent alone, without choice to the ‘colonies’, mostly Commonwealth countries, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe)., Leaving in large steam ships from Liverpool, Glasgow, Plymouth and London, Tilsbury and Gravesend. The project started in 1830’s – 1970’s, where over 130,000 child migrants were sent overseas on a project endorsed by the upper classes, together with a charity, Fairfield run by the Prince of Wales, which raised money to buy land for farms for the children to work there. It was once thought to be convenient, promised as life enhancing for children to be shipped out, with the colonies gaining healthy ‘white stock’. Often siblings were split up and frequently sent to different countries, they were lied to about their parents being alive. Some children went to homes where the children were genuinely looked after, but others were sent to farms where they were cruelly abused on all levels and exploited for their work on the farms1. 1 Patricia Skidmore, Marjorie too Afraid to Cry: a Home Child Experience (Toronto: Dundurn Publications, 2013) 194 195 Fig 9 Curtain of Loss (2012) 10m x 8m polyester taffeta strips backed on to netting APPENDIX 3 In 2010, I started the process of organising an exhibition called ‘LOSS’, with Alice Kettle at Chichester Cathedral, West Sussex, which realised from February 2 – March 30, 2012. It took two years for the exhibition to emerge from concept to reality, in that time ‘LOSS’ grew in volume of exhibits and expectation. We were given all of the North Transept to exhibit which was a 10m x 10m space, with a ceiling height of more than 30m. My work was to exhibit four large textile art installations alongside Professor Alice Kettle who showed her spectacular, large textile embroidery pieces. Scale was an issue as the Cathedral space is enormous, especially the ceiling height. Filling the North Transept with its quadruple height ceiling was a challenge, and initially we were offered boards to put up our work. One of my larger installations was a curtain made from ripped polyester taffeta strips partially sewn on to a net backing with a tensile steel cable inserted through the curtain across the transept. ‘Curtain of Loss’ 10m x 8m, The curtain was significant, as it was so large, it framed the other installations within the space. It became the ‘entrance’ to the exhibition as all visitors had to pass under the curtain, metaphorically walking through to the ‘otherside’. The words written below describe ‘The Curtain of Loss’ 2012, as an introduction of the piece to the public in order to have an explanation of the space: ‘The Curtain of Loss’ (2012) ‘With the attachment of thread, strips of taffeta are sewn onto net fabric. The strips are bound to the net in some sense of order, before they are let go and the strips move with the natural movement of air in such a large space. In terms of significance, the curtain reacts to the energy around it. It introduces the space of LOSS to the exhibition under which all of us will pass through. Eventually we all have to let go, as the living we have to let go of the dead, and the dead have to let go of life. In memory, we still hold our loved ones close to our hearts. The curtain enables us to return to the wider space, and the flow of movement and energy reminds us that we are able to appreciate and enjoy life.’ Words written by Jules Findley to introduce the piece, ‘The Curtain of Loss’, Chichester Cathedral, 2012 196 APPENDIX 4 April 2015 The Edge of Grief Looking at torn edges of paper reminds us of the raw feelings we have for our loved ones and the fragility of our relationships in life. It is intended by the artist and researcher this art piece be interactive and you are invited to comment on how the making affects your feelings and expressions of loss. in the box below. The comments will be collected and kept by the artist for research into bereavement. All comments are anonymous and will be destroyed after use. You may want to recall an event or write a name, or draw. Please write here and fill out the short questionnaire over leaf. Looking at the making please can you tell me how you feel about your expression for loss. Do you think looking at artwork to contemplate your loss is a good idea? YES/NO Do you think a conceptual artwork helps you to think about your loss? YES/NO Do you think bereavement issues should be more openly shared? YES/NO Any other comments please write here: Please tick the box. How long ago was your loss, was it: In the last year/18 months In the last 2-4 years In the last 5-10 years Thank you for your help and contribution This is anonymous and the data for collection will not be stored 197 Raw feedback from LOSS exhibition in Chichester Cathedral (2012), referenced Ch 5 page 125 198 Fig 6 Edge of Grief I, II and III (2015) 2m x 2m handmade paper suspended by monofilament ‘PAIN - Or a Vessel of Grief’ (2012) “The initial raw feeling of LOSS fills you with acute pain. You carry this intense pain around with you like a swelling vessel, filling with pain and grief. The vessel gets heavier and more swollen. Full to the brim, it overflows and some of your tears spill out. You go on, and the vessel collects more tears and swells up again ready for the next spillage. At the beginning of bereavement, grief is unpredictable in its intensity and different types of pain. Tears spill out at the most inconvenient moments.” Words written for the research collection bag, ‘The Bag of Loss’ (2012) made from heavy weight calico, exhibited at Chichester Cathedral, by Jules Findley like a journeyman, walking through life carrying grief through every day experiences. 199 Raw feedback from ‘Edge of Grief I, IIand III’ during ‘Why Would I Lie?’ exhibition Dyson Building RCA Battersea, April 2015), page 62 TRANSGENDER, GENDER & PSYCHOANALYSIS AN EXHIBITION March 2017 It is intended by the artist and researcher this art piece be interactive and you are invited to comment on how the making affects your feelings and expressions of gender in the boxes below. The comments will be collected and kept by the artist for research into impact of her artwork on the general public. All comments are anonymous and will be destroyed after use. Consequences of gender at death. Did you know that if you have changed gen- der and the gender of your birth is not changed, your death is recorded as what you’re born with on your death certificate, and possibly on your headstone? Yes/No Why are you here? Are you a medical doctor? A psychoanalysis? An Artist? A visitor? (circle one that applies) How do you reconcile with families change of gender at death? What would you like to prepare for when you die? How do you think this exhibit allows you to think of gender /trans gender? Do you think this artwork is successful in representing the idea of genderless? Why? Do you think that conceptual artwork helps you think about difficult issues such as gender/transgender/loss/identity Can you think of other ways to portray gender / trans gender using hand made paper? Thank you for your help and contribution This is anonymous and the data for collection will not be stored 200 APPENDIX 5 FEEDBACK FROM DRS WORKSHOP JUNE 2016 Papermaking workshop for DRS16 conference, Brighton Feedback from the Paper Making Workshop from DRS 1st July 2016 Positive feedback from participants: 1. Processes – reminded of cooking and felt the texture pulp, was a good sensation. 2. Explanation was clear, and precise 3. Fun workshop re-using DRS materials and worked out well with the sparkles and pink glow. 4. Could do the thicker type of paper for next time, the variety worked well 5. Bring some examples, to touch, and outputs into artwork 6. Numbers in workshop and possibility of having another couple of bowls 7. Out of head and into hands practice is a different way of thinking – the combination of the two made it a positive experience Challenges 1. making things dry so that participants can take a sample away Tests with students a. Present them my work what the methodology of play is about: Pose a question Write about it Edges of paper, participants could talk about their edges, or com- fort zones as anonymously written and see how they can mindfully work on it b. They could write about how they feel before the workshop. Then see how if anything their feelings changed after the paper making workshop and see if it’s changed their ideas/or emotions c. Results would be interesting with a mixed group of experienced practitioners versus un-experienced, and new practitioners 201 Fig 20, Fig 15, Fig 21, Fig 23, Fig 10 Storyboard discussing materiality 202 APPENDIX 6 Research Journey at Royal College of Art The Work in Progress Shows and Research shows at the Royal College of Art Year 1 January 2013 – A1 poster of ‘PAIN’ close up of hand knitted piece ‘Haptic Visuality’ as described by Professor Laura U. Marks Year 2 January 2014 – 3no Modern Memento Mori 1 and 3, and ‘Lost life, Lost love, Lost Time’ each 200mms x 200mms x 35mms made from acrylic resin and clutter from the deceased Year 3 January 2015 - 103no small 4” unfired paper clay figures April 2015 – ‘Edge of Grief I, II and III’ accepted to ‘Why Would I Lie?’ Research con- ference and exhibition at RCA Battersea https://www.rca.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/why-would-i-lie-exhibition/ Year 4 January 2016 – Fragmented Portrait, ‘Hanging by a Thread’ handmade unsized new pa- per and watercolour Year 5 September 2016 – 2 day http://gendergeneration.rca.ac.uk/about/ Gender Generation Conference at RCA Battersea with Hermione Wiltshire, selected for exhibition and presenting a paper January 2017 – Fragmented portrait series, handmade used paper painted with ash and paper sized with milk weighed to 21grams Year 6 December 2017 – 3 Day Research Conference contributing knowledge RCA White City 203 RESEARCH: CONFERENCES PRESENTED, exhibitions and progression in research 2012 - 2018 Jules Findley Publications: PhD by Design §3 Contribution published September 2016 https://issuu.com/phdbydesign/docs/instant_journal_ drs2016_final ISSN: 2349 4678 online and ISSN: 2349 465X print RCA interdisciplinary competitive biannual exhibition 2015, ‘Why Would I Lie?’ Essay for Book published April 2015 www.lie.rca.ac.uk ISBN 978-1-910642-05-4 @lierca ‘PAIN without Boundaries’ published by Interdisciplinary.net ISBN 978-1-84888-316-1 Published chapter in book Section 111: Creating from Pain ‘Funeral Rites, Pain and Bereavement: A Study using Textile Art’ January 2015 Conferences Papers Presented: November 25 2017 Being Human Symposium – co-organiser Royal College of Art, Kensington, London https://beinghumanfestival.org/event/the-journey-of-mater- nal-matter-symposium/ November 3 2017 Craft, Absorption and Feminism Decorating Dissodence Queen Mary University, London https://decoratingdissidence.wordpress.com/ September 8, 9 2016 ‘Maternal Absorption’ Gender Gen- eration RCA presented paper and had work selected for exhibition by Hermione Watson http://gendergeneration. rca.ac.uk/about/ 15 July 2016 WP Conference Student Experience and WP “Into the Arts” University of Brighton http://arts.brighton. ac.uk/into-arts 1 July Papermaking workshop with DRS 27/28/29/30 June 2016 DRS 2016 Conference University of Brighton 204 PhD by Design 27 June Paper Accepted ‘Edge of Grief’ http://www.drs2016.org/#drs2016 3-6 September 2015 ‘Edge of Grief’ Death, Dying and Disposal 12, (DDD12) Romania 1-2 June 2015 ‘Death of a child without a Body’ M’Otherhood Southbank University, London https://motherhoodandcreativepractice.wordpress.com/ June 12 – 14, 2014 Fashion in Fiction: Style Stories and Transglobal Narratives: 2014, paper presented ‘Fashion in Death’ City University of Hong Kong http://fashioninfiction2014.com/ 13 – 15 September 2013 “Beauty in Death” paper presented at BEAUTY3 Inter-disci- plinary.net, Harris Manchester College, Oxford, http://www. inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ethos/beauty/project-ar- chives/conference-programme-abstracts-and-papers/ 5 – 7 September 2013 “Knitting and Bereavement” paper presented at Death, Dy- ing and Disposal 11, Open University, Milton Keynes, http://www.deathandsociety.org/pages/ddd11-conference. php 10 July 2013 “Research, Cognition and Practice” presented paper at Knowledge and Experience conference at Department of Humanities, University of Southampton, http://discover.medievalchester.ac.uk/static/media/uploads/ KE%20conf%20programme%2023.06.13.pdf 9 - 12 May 2013 “Pain in Bereavement”
 paper presented at PAIN4 Inter-dis- ciplinary.net, Michna Palace, Ujed, Mana Strana, Prague, Czech Republic http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/prob- ing-the-boundaries/making-sense-of/pain/call-for-papers/ Residences: September 2017 Selected for DAR Digital Online Residency http://digitalartistresidency.org for 1-30 SEPTEMBER invit- ed Linda Duvall to join me in CONVERSATION OVERSEAS 205 across UK, Canada and Singapore discussing Child Immigra- tion Programme through on-line creative outputs. May 2017 Invited to join artist Linda Duvall ‘In a Hole’ two day residence spending six hours each day down a hole with Linda Duvall in Saskatoon, Canada. The response being screened live from ‘PAVED’ Saskatoon http://www.lindadu- vall.com/ http://www.pavedarts.ca/2016/the-disappearing-hole/ September 2016 Awarded http://residencyinmotherhood. com/ from Lenka Clayton developing an artist based resi- dence on the mother eliminated Exhibitions: May 2017 Invited to join artist Linda Duvall ‘Down a Hole’ two day residence spending six hours each day in a man- made dug out hole with Linda Duvall in Saskatoon, Canada. The response being screened live from ‘PAVED’ Saskatoon http://www.lindaduvall.com/ http://www.pavedarts.ca/category/exhibitions/current/ completed 2 sketchbooks and 11 A1 works on paper March 2017 Site Fringe 2017 Elephant and Castle Conference about Transgender Gender and Psychoanalysis http://www.the-site.org.uk/events/transgender-gender-psycho- analysis/ Freud Museum and SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis January 2017 Work in Progress RCA Kensington Research 5 Floor http://www.rca.ac.uk/news-and-events/events ‘Ripped apart’ 2017, fragmented portrait on handmade paper September 2016 RCA Dyson building Gender Generation .. http://gendergeneration.rca.ac.uk/about/ ’Without a body’ 160 paper clay 4” bodies on display January 2016 Work in Progress RCA Kensington Gulbenkian Gal- lery http://www.rca.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/re-think-research/ ‘Hanging by a Thread’ 2016, fragmented portrait on handmade paper April 2015 ‘Why would I Lie’ research biennale RCA Batter- sea, Dyson Building https://www.rca.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/why-would-i- lie-exhibition/ http://lie.rca.ac.uk/ paper ‘Edge of Grief3no I, IIinstallations and III’ made from handmade 206 January 2015 Work in Progress RCA Kensington Gulbenkian Gallery http://www.rca.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/school-materi- al-work-progress-show/ Discussing death without a body. 103 handmade 4” bodies made from paper clay January 2014 Work in Progress RCA Kensington Gulbenkian Gallery http://www.rca.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/wip2014_ma- terial/ Resin made memoria made into new ‘momento mori’ September 2013 – May 2014 LACE1 part of the CRYSALIS Open Call Exhibition, Two large A1 installations at the Lace Museum, Calais, France http://www.crysalis-network.eu/en/lace-effects-112.htm June 21 – July 28 2013 Installations in with participating artists, Curious Trail 2013, West Norwood Cemetery, London http://www.westnorwoodcemetery.com/curious_2013/curi- ous_artists_2013/jules_findley/ January 2013 Work in Progress RCA Kensington Gulbenkian gallery Poster of haptic image LOSS exhibition February and March 2012 articulating be- reavement with Alice Kettle, Chichester Cathedral, West Sussex www.lossandlove.co.uk www.facebook.com/LOSSandLOVE @LOSSandLOVE 207 Fashion in Death, Hong Kong June 12, 2014 Jules Findley Academic Programme Leader, Fashion and Textiles School of Art, Design and Media, University of Brighton. PhD Candidate, Royal College of Art, London. Abstract: I am examining the memorialisation of death for the bereaved and our preconceptions of burial in the sensitive subject of death of a child in England. Parents cope with the emotional journey to accept such a tragedy and begin forming an everlasting memory of a short life. In processing these emotions, the rites the bereaved parents practice will help them accept the death of their child. Motherhood naturally involves attachment that is inevitably prematurely severed after the death of her baby or child. Love, separation and attachment form the key components of loss, bereavement and burial. The tendency is for parents not to move on in their bereavement for fear of losing that vital connection with their child. Attitudes to funerals and burials in particular are changing, however there is the daunting task of arrangements, which involves choosing a garment for the child to wear for burial. How do parents decide on clothing for their beloved child to be buried or cremated? Many rituals are made via the midwives or nurses that cleanse the dead babies that die at birth or children after a short time of life. In particular, all the senses are heightened for a parent in death of a child. The intense pain parents feel in the raw stages of bereavement is akin to a physical pain. The roller coaster of emotions may have already been traumatic for the parents and perhaps siblings too. In death there has to be acceptance and acknowl- edgement. For many, it’s as if time stands still for those painful years afterwards. The in- stallations are a voice for the bereaved as a place where they can express their own grief. Installations raise public awareness of grief issues and questions; through the manipula- tion of making paper and mixed media. Paper is flexible in its qualities, it can be comprised of layers like grief; paper has strengths and weaknesses, and can look and behave like skin. Paper has many properties, sustainable, easy to burn, decomposing. To encompass fragility and delicateness for a young child and answer the challenging questions that the material poses, being able to make paper attractive and as delicate as fabric is a challenge. The investigation into this research is timely, as rituals in death and talking about bereavement are beginning to open up. The recent photographic retrospective exhibition at Somerset House on Isabella Blow is discursive on the narrative of her life. There are sensitive issues to discuss and address globally, it is time to question some of these rituals and make new ones. Fashion in Death (COVER SLIDE 1) In the short essay by Leopardi ‘Dialogue between Fashion and Death’ written in 1824, Leopardi writes of ‘Fashion’ as being the sister of ‘Death’, both being born from ‘Decay’. Death retorts she is the enemy of ‘Memory’. ‘Fashion’ reminds ‘Death’ that they both profit from constant change and destruction in different ways. (SLIDE 2) ‘Fashion’ says that they incessantly renew the world. Fashion though customs, adorn- ment, through piercings, torture and crippling, playing with female and men’s bodies. ‘I torture and cripple people with small shoes. I stifle women with stays so tight, that their eyes start from their heads; and I play a thousand similar pranks. I also frequently per- suade and force men of refinement to bear daily numberless fatigues and discomforts, and often real sufferings; and some even die gloriously for love of me.’ (SLIDE 3) 208 ‘Fashion’ does not represent enrichment or celebration of life but a manipulation of body and health according to her caprice and can cause destruction and death for the sake of fashion. Although Death is revealed by Leopardi, Bereavement is not mentioned nor Grief, or Attachment. These are all cousins of Death and Life. In this passage there are no reflections of emotions or discussion of feelings, it is the description of what happens through caprice and what role Death and Fashion play in life, it is significant, witty and descriptive in the written narrative. In reality in the physical narrative of our lives we prepare for various ritual events, for marriage in what we wear and its significance, a formal christening or baptism, but no longer for death. Fashion in death has been forgotten together with the lack of preparation in our lives for an inevitable occurrence. In adulthood loss of life is significant and in the more aged should be celebratory, however in death of a child it is poignant as there are more losses to consider, loss of hope, loss of potential, loss of plans as well as loss of life. 1. What amounts to Loss? ‘For most of us, the fact that one day we shall lose the ones we love, and they us, draws us closer to them but remains a silent bell that wakes us in the night.’ Parkes. C. M. (2009) Parkes goes on to say that there are a silent set of rules, which govern our love and loss, which have not been measured as it has been deemed to be too calculating in mathemat- ical terms. How can you quantify love in loss? Sometimes loss is mitigated by forming a new attachment, another child or a new relationship. However our relationships are not interchangeable. We may have the excuse to buy a new dress in preparation for a happy event, we do not necessarily know what to do in preparation for sadness in our life. In England, generally our coping methods are much less developed than in other areas of our life this is partly due to media and fashion. Our general education and knowledge about loss and facing up to death is limited, compared to other subjects on the school curricu- lum or taking parenting skills later on in life. Yet mortality should be on the curriculum, preparation and bereavement should be tackled, as they are just as important as birth. (SLIDE 4) Bowlby. J (1969) wrote about the theory of attachment and ‘monotropy’, having a bond with one attachment figure, believing that the mother to be the central caregiver and should be given on a continuous basis. After a NHS study in 1958 of children taken into hospitals for minor surgery, and they filmed the children being detached from their moth- ers, Bowlby’s study on the emotional deprivation of the children taken from their moth- ers during relatively short stays in hospital changed NHS attitudes to having parents in hospitals and the importance of that. This study was significant in terms of the NHS being more emotionally aware and compassionate to families as well as the patients. Bowlby believed that ‘maternal deprivation’ refers to separation or loss from an attached figure, and could have detrimental effects on the consequent failure to develop an attachment to any figure. Consequences for ‘maternal deprivation’ are not good for the child and include increased aggression, depression, reduced intelligence or affectionless psychopathy. The effects of loss on parents can be psychological, through grief and its complications, depression, anxiety, psychiatric disorders and often it is not possible to form a new at- tachment or have another child. The parents are left to cope with their loss or losses. The effect on the mother is devastating. Parkes C.M (2010 p49) discusses ‘pangs of grief’ cites Didion (2005) in ‘Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life’ (SLIDE 5) 209 Parkes goes on to discuss Bowlby with Robertson, in a study of children being separat- ed from their mothers, the children behave in a manner of ‘yearning and protest’ as that was the way that children were treated at the time in the early 1950’s just as the National Health Service was thriving in England. However by 1970, when parents grieve for their child Bowlby and Parkes wrote about ‘yearning and searching for the lost figure’. Parkes cites Kathe Kollovitz (2010 p48) who worked on a number of years on a monument for her younger son, Peter who was killed in the First World War in October 1914. Two years later she notes in her diary, “ There’s a drawing made, a mother letting her dead son slide into her arms. I could do a hundred similar drawings but still can’t seem to come any closer to him. I’m still searching for him as if it were in the very work itself that I had to find him’ Catalogue to an exhibition exhibited by K. Kollovitz, London, 1967 (SLIDE 6) How do parents cope when they cannot have children to replace their loss? In this signif- icant moment they always remember the death of their child. In particular, the mothers never forget as their child grew in them and they gave birth to that child, attachment forming a long time before birth. In Layne (2003, Chapter 4), ‘When a pregnancy ends without a live birth, there are no rites to reincorporate the woman’ Layne goes on to cite Crapanzano (1981), when a woman goes through all the rites of pregnancy, good diet, not drinking alcohol, doctors and hospital visits, and then after a miscarriage or stillbirth in spite of delivering a baby, must return to the pre-pregnancy status rather than advancing to the new or renewed sta- tus of ‘mother’. Layne (ibid) ‘Newborns are often ritually secluded and not named until after a fixed period of time has elapsed’ In rural China, a normal live baby is given a ritual called ‘child-reaching-full-month’ ceremony is held where the child is shaved and the maternal uncle gives the child a personal name, rather than ‘Mei Ming’, or ‘no name’. In England, losing a baby either in stillbirth or late miscarriage, you are encouraged by the health professionals to give that baby a name, an identity. The child has an identity and then a funeral. 2. Memorialisation (SLIDE 7) Freud observes after death, bereaved parents commence the ‘work of mourning’, and ritualizing identity (Freud, 1917). Grief is unique for each person, some parents memo- rialise their loss of their child through charities, sport or remembrance of visiting their graves. Freud mentions ‘grief work’, as various stages of processes to work through as part of mourning on the way to recovery. The period of time is indefinable but can be from months to years. Today hospitals take photographs of babies who have died for their and parents records. This is the narrative of life passed, no matter how short, and is docu- mented factually for hospital records. Parents are encouraged to take records but often are unprepared in actuality. (SLIDE 8) Photography has often been used to memorialize the dead since the Victorian times when mourning was more open and public. At one stage it was almost fashionable to have a portrait of a dead relative with the family as a remembrance. This narrative of fashion in ritual and portraiture from those times was exhibited in ‘Death: A Self-Portrait’ at the Wellcome Collection, November 2012 – February 2013, from the Richard Harris collec- tion of works memorialising death. There are some uses of photography where families wish to record the funeral of a loved one as they would a wedding. (SLIDE 9) Photography has relevance today in its narrative of recording death and artistic response. In terms of art and exhibiting the dead, Linkman (2011) mentions the work of Richard Avedon who published in ‘Autobiography’ 1993, a photographic record of the final years 210 of his father’s last years in life and his death when he died of cancer, in 1972. (SLIDE 10) Avedon makes a stark photographic tribute to his father. The end of life photographs are photographed at a low angle as his father is lying down dead, a contrast to the previous portrait photographs of his father standing alive. The photographs are black and white, and his father has a certain texture to his face and clothing set against a white back- ground. The head goes into the white and the low angle closest to the camera becomes apart of the photographer still connected to earth. (SLIDE 11 SLIDE12) Linkman (2011 p169), cites Kubler-Ross and Kessler when they write about the purpose of loss: “It unifies us. It helps deepen our understanding of each other. It connects us to each oth- er in a way that no other lesson of life can. When we are joined in the experience of loss, we care for one another and experience one another in a new and profound ways” Helen Ennis a photographic curator, produced ‘Reveries’, an exhibition on artists’ re- sponse to death and grief through their photographic records. Ennis (2007), writes about her experiences at a funeral for a stillborn baby, there was a ceremony to celebrate his short life in the womb. She talks about how the little baby’s life in the womb was rec- ognised, his short presence was celebrated with music, poetry and a eulogy given by a family friend. The baby was talked to ‘sung to, touched, caressed and photographed. He was photographed with all the members of his family, mother, father, his grand parents and other members of the family, being bathed, being held’ and in his Moses basket. (2007 p5) It made Ennis realize, “when it came to death, photography isn’t necessarily a separate activity carried out in isolation from everything else – it can be part of a whole range of life practices, of ritual” (ibid p5) (SLIDE 13) In memorialization of her mother, Miyako Ishiuchi (2005) tries to represent the senses in her photographic work. She studied textiles at Tama Art University, Japan, but left before she gained her degree, instead she uses the camera lens as her way of recording the tex- tural image. Ishiuchi’s mother died unexpectedly and it was after she had resolved some tensions and problems in her relationship with her mother. Prior to her mother’s death and after death, she photographed her mother’s wrinkled skin, her feet and her scars on her body. These areas, feet, skin, scars and hands she has explored in other projects and published material. (SLIDE 14) Ishiuchi photographed her mother’s personal effects, including her clothing and poignant details of a previous life, the garments look worn. Photographing her mother’s deeply personal items such as her hairbrush, false teeth, shoes, she also photographed her moth- er’s underwear. Ishiuchi (2005 p124) (SLIDE 15) ‘Her old undergarments, which had lost the only value they had as familiar attire of their owner seemed to me to be almost pieces of her skin. It was not a pleasant feeling to have them about the house after she was gone. Thus just like her body when they were no longer of any use, I thought I would burn them or put them in the trash, but I found myself unable to perform this simple act… Feeling that it would be easier to dispose of them if I photographed then first, I began to do so” (SLIDE 16) By photographing such intimate garments in black and white the photographs capture her experience of loss, and the idea of memory within the fragility and delicateness of the underwear. In black and white they have an everlasting memorialisation of the garments and of a presence within. (SLIDE 17) 211 3. Why paper is suitable in burial Paper has been used in dresses for a long time, early papier-mâché clothes and acces- sories especially in dressing up in party wear were made in the 19th Century. In 1920’s, paper suits were imported from Germany, cut to English styles. They were designed to be disposable with a new suit once a week, and more economical than the cost of an annual purchase of a ‘proper fabric suit’ In the 1960’s, there was a fashion of using paper clothing in USA mass produced start- ed by Scott Paper company, when new materials could make paper softer. There was a novelty of disposable clothing and became a craze as it was new, cheap and throw away. However it was a short-lived fad as the clothes were ill-fitting, and not comfortable. The coloured dye wasn’t fixed and could rub off. Different qualities of disposable paper-like fabrics ware manufactured for example, ‘Kaycel’ made by Kimberly-Clark consisted of 93% cellulose and 7% nylon made paper dresses in the late 1950’s, ‘Ree-May’, a spun bonded polyester was manufactured by Du Pont, and a nonwoven rayon called ‘Webril’ made by Kendall. These types of disposable cellulose paper fabrics found use in work places such as hospitals in scrubs where hygiene needs to be a sterile environment. Even today disposable pants can be purchased through ‘OneDer Wear’ Paper is historic, it’s sustainable, easily burnable, ethical, can be used for burial and has properties that can be used to include memoria or kept plain. Paper can be made by hand from torn cotton rags, or manufactured, and can be made as bespoke, it can incorporate memoria or prepared as a paper shroud for burial purposes. Paper comes in different weights, different grades, and colours. (SLIDE 18) Piper Shepard takes lace and reworks it in her unique method of cutting to make ‘con- trolled’ wall hangings. Her ideas come from lace but it’s the repetition as a composed strategy, labour, process and perseverance that makes her large installations interna- tionally reknown. In 2005, Piper Shepard was invited to work with the collected lace archives in the Cone Collection in Baltimore, ( SLIDE 19) Shepard started to make fine cut work in the style of lace in her large installations. In 2006, she used an antique lace from W.A.Cadbury and proposed a cloth wall to bisect two columns for the ‘Lost in Lace’ exhibition, an installation in Birmingham. Her methods are to use calico, which she pre-prepares with gesso and then prints the pattern on it working into the cut work labo- riously using a knife. (SLIDE 20) Work can take up to six months to produce a long wall hanging. More recently she has been working with doilies 360 degrees. (SLIDE 21) In my work I am striving to digitally achieve paper cutting to a high degree, so that the paper will look pretty, through either cutting by hand or use of digital plotters or laser cutting. 4. Conclusion (SLIDE 22) In 2009, Dying Matters Coalition was set up by the National Council for Palliative Care in order to facilitate the discussion and making public aware of talking about and pre- paring for death. According to a recent survey 83% of British are uncomfortable talking about dying and death. 72% of us want to die at home, yet most of us presently die in hospital. (SLIDE 23) Perhaps it’s because we don’t talk about death is the reason why we mostly end our lives in hospital or perhaps it’s because we have lost the family connec- tion or we’re too preoccupied with our own lives to be bothered with the aged and their care. However when it come to a child, it’s one of the types of death parents don’t want to talk about, and the other is death by suicide, and yet we should. Returning to Kubler-Ross and Kessler, we all want the closeness of our friends and family around us in grief for our loss. Connection is important and part of the social aspect of our lives. (SLIDE 24) 212 Returning to Leopardi, ‘Decay’ the mother of ‘Death’ and ‘Fashion’ can be reunited through Fashion in Death. Decay the mother of both Fashion and Death will eventually be in all of us our liminal lives are a certainty. Fashion and temporality, fashion and death, we need to practice the ideas of being comfortable with death and be allowed to grieve without stigma. (SLIDE 25) There is a tacit assumption that parents, colleagues friends when they return to work are fit and well without mourning attire or no symbol of recent death to wear anymore, especially in the death of a child or neo natal death. (SLIDE 26) We should not assume anything, as we do not know how others feel who are recently bereaved. Through the nar- rative of words and pictures we can express our thoughts of death. Expression of mourn- ing through fashion can be questioned now and perhaps should be revived. (SLIDE 27) Bibliography Bowlby. J (1969) ‘Attachment. Attachment and Loss: Vol 1. Loss’ Basic Books New York Crapanzano, V. (1981) “Rite of Return: Circumcision in Morocco’ pp15-36, in ‘The Psychoanalytical Study of Society’ edited by Warner Muensterberger and L. Bryce Boyer. New York: Library of Psychological Anthropology Ennis, H. (2007) ‘Reveries: Photography & Mortality’ National Portrait Gallery NSW, Australia Freud, S. (1917) ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ The Standard Edition of the Com- plete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 237-258 Harris, R. (2012) ‘Death: A Picture Album’ Wellcome Collection Ishiuchi, M (2005) ‘Mother’s 2000-2005:Traces of the Future’ Japanese Pavillion, Venice Parkes, C.M. (2009) ‘Love and Loss’ Routledge, London Parkes, C. M. & Markus (1998) ‘Coping with Loss’ BMJ Publishing Group, Lon- don Layne. L. L (2003) ‘Motherhood Lost’ Taylor & Francis USA, Routledge UK Linkman, A. (2011) Photography and Death’ Reaktion books Walford, J. (2007). Ready to tear : paper fashions of the 60s. [Fonthill, Ont.]: Kickshaw Productions. http://mentalfloss.com/article/21361/disposable-suits-and-paper-underpants accessed 12th May 2014 http://www.one-wear.co.uk/ accessed 12th May 2014 213 Fig 14, Fig 17, Fig 33 Storyboard to discuss elements 214 215 216