Grief accompanies death - a psychological and physiological response to the loss of someone dear or significant. That said, grief may occur as the result of a number of other causes: loss of well-being, sexual function, safety, physical mobility, objects, love or community, independence, income, hopes and home.
The malady can seem overwhelming and omnipresent, engulfing you without warning or invitation and, most often, through unexpected associations to certain people, places and inanimate objects. Once the initial trauma has passed the remaining void can, for some, become irreversible. Recurring bouts of pain connected to the event surface continually, prolonging the suffering as well as the healing process and - in extreme cases – causing serious, long-term psychological or somatic illnesses.
The focus of my work is grief.
In particular, I am interested in the human desire – perhaps, imperative - to search for some kind of relief or explanation, often beyond the seemingly rational or intelligible. Although the stages of grief are often characterized as culturally universal, their ramifications are as individual as the person affected. Grief can, at times, appear to be short-lived - apparently leaving no obvious, lasting damage. In some cases, however, the emotional torment and concomitant scars leave irreparable consequences: indefinite and devastating.
The intensity of grief felt by the sufferer is often incomprehensible to the witness or beholder. There is no cure. Medication may sedate the initial trauma but it fails to address the actuality of loss. Only psychological resilience and, maybe, time can ever enable the adjustment to ‘being’ required when learning to live with grief.
By awarding grief an identity – Penthos - my imagery provides a personified, malevolent narrative for this potentially crippling condition, making manifest the despair, the separation from reality and the endlessly-thwarted aspirations of the sufferer.
I aim to show how the unfathomable process of grief places its quarry within a desolate and abstruse state of mind, where normality becomes distant, and escape beyond reach.
