The Ones Who Went Before and Come Again
The Ones Who Went Before and Come Again is a quote pulled from the book, On the Wild Edge of Sorrow, by Francis Weller. In it, Weller explains the five gates of grief. The first being obvious; the loss of someone or something we love. Because the others don't get much attention in the modern world, they also don't receive much processing support.
This series is about that processing; of loss, illness and recovery, and reclaiming oneself; very personal grief. It's also about world grief and generational grief; some of the stuff that is a challenge to identify and deal with.
The well know term "empty nest syndrome" is used to describe the feeling of grief and loneliness felt by a parent when their child leaves the home, to live on their own or pursue higher education. Those experiencing other shifts are more susceptible to this kind of grief. Between 2020 and 2023 there was a lot of challenge and change, maybe for all of us. In 2020 we moved from the home my daughter grew up in. It was a nerve wracking and exciting time. My daughter was a junior in high school then. Once she left for college, the loss of our former home and life became more palpable. If that wasn’t enough, I began having chronic dizziness and other symptoms I later learned was a result of long-Covid, it was a confusing time of trying to figure out what was happening. Then our cat of 14 years, who chose my daughter when we visited the cat rescue when she was 5, passed. These were all the personal changes, but I was becoming more aware of the impact that the shock of a changing world was having on me too. A world that often felt too fast, but at the same time too slow with course correction.
In many ways I was longing for the past. A past I did not necessarily know. A past that felt safer because it no longer exists. I wanted to fix in time what was still present for me, maybe even commemorate the mundane things. I began playing around with two things, two ways of making. First was a craft I had found when looking for traditional Polish rituals. In my research I came across these striking chandelier-like forms. They are a craft made originally by women in the Polish countryside beginning in the 18th century. They are brightly colored, made with straw and paper, and hung in the home especially during the cold dark winter months, but also for other celebrations. And they are meant to bring good luck. Pajaki, which means spiders in Polish, is what they are called. I began teaching myself how to make them.
I also decided that all the stuff left behind by my daughter meant something to me. It was all stuff she decided wasn't important enough to take with her, but things she used at one point, in some ways to assert her personhood or femininity. While I had never used cyanotype before, it occurred to me that it might be the perfect medium to capture the materiality of the things I wanted to collect, maybe even make mine, but not keep for myself.
At some point parts of the two methods of making began to merge. I exposed parts of the pajaki to cyanotype; false eyelashes on the circle cutouts used as spacers in the leggy parts of the chandeliers and I began pasting paper flower parts to the cyanotypes themselves. Working in this way became a sort of ecosystem for me and my work and a way to transmute the heaviness of the world and personal changes.