20 x 30 in., 2024.
20 x 30 in., 2024.
This new print work, a series of nests, began towards the end of the pandemic, in 2022. During this time, I was struggling with feelings of isolation and complex grief after the sudden deaths of multiple close family members. The nest form in the dark black and white rendering of woodcut was an attempt at a funerary wreath, or an idea of 19th-century mourning decorations—think black buntings, ribbons with black silk, or dried flower arrangements. I had, many years ago, made a study of this type of morbid decoration without fully understanding the grief behind it. A quick image search of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train, and how towns decorated for the train’s arrival is my favorite example of morbid decoration.
There is a strange magic in grief, which is maybe part of my fascination with the aesthetic. There is a permission to create a theater with arrangements, with symbols of the loved ones lost. Unremarkable objects are made remarkable, magical, powerful even, by their relation to the loved one. Suspension of disbelief is easy in these moments as we desperately give over to any glimmer of hope, or more cruelly, a retreat into a fantasy that reality might have an alternative.
When I started these prints, I was spending a great deal of time walking, mostly on circuits, of the same loop through the woods. I have been doing this in the same area for many seasons. It is not uncommon for me to walk the same short loop three or four times a trek. By repeating this circuit, I was marking details in the woods that I otherwise might not have noticed, like specific patterns in the bark, random jumbles of windfall, pieces of shredded scattered pinecones. These unremarkable things, memorized but constantly changing, became a backdrop for my thoughts. It was difficult for me to work during this time, but when I started to make these woodcuts with the intention of making decorative arrangements, the “stuff” in the images that I started to draw had the patterns, textures, and characters of my walks.
Spring Nest is perhaps a straightforward and earnest attempt at classic symbolism, with spring a banishing of death and the eggs a prayer for rebirth, all locked into the static and Gothic stillness of black and white relief. Squirrel’s Nest, however, is something perhaps more intimate and less didactic of my understanding of grief symbolism and decoration. I find it harder to look at and sit with, as its meaning is specific to me and my loss rather than the aesthetics of morbid decoration in general. There is a pain there that I kept trying to smooth away, to make pretty and sweet with tenderness, but its ache remains. This, I think, is part of the point of decorating for grief. There is catharsis to beautifying these painful feelings. It is ultimately a hopeful endeavor