I think of grief as more of a conceptual companion now but, for a time, I felt a need to sit very literally with death. I worked with a generous taxidermist who supplied me with references, discarded and un-prized parts of animals who had been hunted. I used them to create these ceramic sculptures, my hope being to make something beautiful out of loss, to memorialize rather than to wallow. I forced myself to bear the stench of rot, to sit with oozing viscera, to study the structure of a piece of what had lived in a way I never could have during the creature’s life. I touched these pieces tenderly and I molded the clay into their effigies. 

For many years now I’ve had grief on my mind. I turn it in the light and examine its shadows, its shining facets. There’s the grief of lost life, of course. There’s the grief of lost love as well. Grief of what I had hoped for that did not bear fruit. Collective grief. The grief of shifting friendships and community ties. The grief within oneself as pieces are cleaved and forged. The grief of injustice. I’ve come to believe that any change holds a kind of grief, as any change holds an inherent loss, and I’ve come to find myself sitting with the concept of grief daily. I sit with it as a kind of love, which is as much a measure of its depths as any sadness. I can see in my own life the marks of what I’ve lost, they shimmer and surprise me in so many places. I hold them dearly, because who else will tend my memories and hopes? How else can I extend the presence of who and what I have loved? Where does all of that go when, one day, my own name is said for the last time?

The clay itself had been given to me by someone whom I had loved, who had hurt me very deeply, and who had not been in my life for many months at the time of making. It had been hand-made and given to him by a beloved teacher who had died many years before that. And in between these two losses, one which I experienced and one which was passed on to me, I felt a different and devastating loss through the death of another person whom I had loved, and who had also hurt me deeply. I can in retrospect examine the tangles of love and loss within both myself and the very material with which I sculpted, but I chose to not think too hard about any of that at the time. 

Instead, I said the work was about helping people to see the beauty of nature by appreciating a part of the whole. This was not a lie, but it was an omission. I was afraid to openly share my grief, which seemed strange to me, and the way it was expressing itself, which I was worried would seem strange to everyone else. So I tidied it up and made it presentable. I think I even did that for myself, but truth has a way of showing up over time. 

So I now present this body of work with a touch more candor than I previously have. I still hope to have created something beautiful out of loss, but I’m willing to be more forthright about the mess it took to get there.