Breathing Life into Death
How can i capture all this grief, all these feelings in one masters degree art project? It is likely that I cannot.
How can it measure up to all this reading, writing, thinking, crying? It probably won’t.
If everyone grieves differently, then who the hell am I to even attempt to make something relevant to anyone’s sphere beyond my own. And yet, of course, I want to try.
It has been one of the most painful tasks I have ever taken on and has oft times felt like reliving my grief as though it were fresh, seven years later.
Everything I have touched and breathed since July has echoed with the essence of this project. I have produced reams of notes, voice memos, interview, poem, drunk conversation with friends. Thoughts have sprung upon me at surprising and inconvenient times (including this note, written while standing in the middle of a low-priced London gym).
Any creative process is always unpredictable, but I did not know the creative process could lead to so many dead ends. I think this has something to do with being driven to make something meaningful about a topic so personal and traumatic - how deep I need to dig and then synthesise. It is difficult to make something that does not flatten the subject matter or the lost loved one, and flattening is precisely what I want to avoid.
Then there are the demands to produce a neat communication design project (art but not strictly an “art project”) fitting for the contemporary digital audience. I am faced with designing something that tells so abstract and incomprehensible a story with clarity. It’s forced me to face my own anxieties towards calling myself an artist – in fear of this becoming an autobiographical ego project, I have attempted to abstract myself from it but it will always be rooted in my own lived experiences (and this does not need to diminish its relevance as an exploration of mortality in the digital age for more than just myself).
It has truly been an agonising and relentlessly excruciating process; I have struggled to come up with anything vaguely sufficient. The gravity of the topic and my perceived inadequacy is paralysing. I am normally a proponent of play and experimentation in design projects, but nothing I try to make ever touches the intangible sense of what I feel I should be making. Digital mediation precipitates a dilution of the topic that I am fixed upon avoiding (yet cannot avoid, it seems).
Grief and the perception of our own mortality is perhaps so boundless a topic and utterly beyond articulation that something always gets lost in transmission. Where I stand at the end of this, I am not quite sure. Back at the intersections between disciplines, technologies, art forms and people, it seems (back where I started). But hopefully having tried to create something that reconfigures the mortality awareness narrative to a digital lexicon.