Studio Saudade - working creatively with grief

09/02/2024

For Annabel, my sista-crone in honour of our matrilineal lineage

For Annabel, my sista-crone in honour of our matrilineal lineage

11/03/2023

′"Grandma, how do you face pain?”

With your hands, my child. If you do it with your mind, instead of relieving pain, it gets even harder.

With the hands grandma?

Yes, our hands are the antennas of our soul.

If you move them by knitting, cooking, painting, playing or sinking them into the earth, you send care signals to the deepest part of you. And your soul lights up, because you’re paying attention to it.

Then the pain signals will no longer be necessary.

Are hands really that important?

Yes, my daughter, think of babies, they begin to know the world thanks to the touch of their little hands.

If you look at the hands of old people, they tell you more about their life than any other part of the body.

Everything that is made by hand, is said to be made with the soul. Because it’s really like that, the hands and soul are connected.

Think of lovers, when they touch hands, they make love in a sublime way.

My hands, grandma… how long have I not used them like this?

Just move them my dear, start creating with them and everything inside you will move.

The pain will not pass but instead whatever you do with it will become the most beautiful masterpiece.

And it won’t hurt anymore.

Because you’ve been able to transform their essence.

Elena Bernabe
del muro de SanArte

"Abuela, ¿como se afronta el dolor?" Con las manos, cariño. Si lo haces con la mente, en lugar de aliviar el dolor, éste se endur...

06/11/2022

Talking with my friend Margaret, I was reminded of the work done by Joseph E. Furey in the 6 years following the death of his wife Lillian. I've always loved the work, but even more so now and understand the saudade that permeates his experience of making: how his work simultaneously honours, grieves, remembers, celebrates his wife and allows him the space he needs to rebuild his life from - and with - loss.

14/08/2022

‘Tis a fearful thing
to love what death can touch.
A fearful thing
to love, to hope, to dream, to be –
to be,
And oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
And a holy thing,
a holy thing
to love.
For your life has lived in me,
your laugh once lifted me,
your word was gift to me.
To remember this brings painful joy.
‘Tis a human thing, love,
a holy thing, to love
what death has touched

'Tis a Fearful Thing by Yehuda HaLevi, 12th century

14/08/2022

Daniel Regan's - I'll Be Seeing You - is a multidisciplinary artwork that explores how he experienced the first year of loss after the death of his mother, Teena.

I’ll Be Seeing YouI’ll Be Seeing You is a multidisciplinary project exploring the first year of living without my mother, Teena, who died suddenly in February 2019. Our close and yet complicated relationship suddenly became frozen in time, leaving me to explore several creative avenues in an att...

31/07/2022

07/07/2022

This is the most beautiful, raw and honest grief memoir writing I have ever had the honor to read. I highly recommend it. Thank you Debra Gwartney for writing it.

My husband had been sick long enough, a string of years, that I’d begun to think of his diagnosis as a rumor. He was interminably terminally ill. Until he

01/07/2022

For me, the only healthy response to grief is to be wholly in it - wherever that takes me. To fully inhabit it, rather than fight it. Grief has redefined - or at least clarified - the central goal of my life: I am not in pursuit of happiness, I seek authenticity.

Grief is one of those experiences that seems like a black-out to me. To comprehend the magnitude of what death really means—that concept of forever—is so challenging on an intellectual level that p…

07/06/2022

I love how Song D**g reimagines his mother's hoarding by tenderly relating it to her grief.

"When Mr. Song’s father died, in 2002, his mother was inconsolable. She continued to live in the jammed Beijing house, throwing nothing away and obsessively bringing more stuff into it, as if continuing to feather a nest for a now-absent family... Mr. Song proposed that they turn the accumulated junk into an art project. In this way, he argued, nothing would be discarded and lost; everything would be meaningfully recycled and preserved."

This speaks perfectly for my current thinking. I am finally releasing some of John's stuff into the world where it will most represent who he was and what he loved and I am making art from much of the rest.

https://beachpackagingdesign.com/boxvox/waste-not-song-dong-at-moma

07/06/2022

I love Heidi Lau's sense that her clay work is a way of grieving with her hands

Heidi Lau channels personal history, colonial culture, and the spiritual world through her hands and into her otherworldly clay works. Delighting in chance and improvisation, Lau shapes all her clay sculptures by hand and applies overlapping layers of glaze to create iridescent works that resemble a...

24/05/2022

This beautiful paragraph from the short story Clatter Tongue by Karen Wyld describes grief in a way I've never heard before but that makes deep sense. "Pop handed Treanna the bracelet at the funeral. She’d been inconsolable when she heard Buddy wasn’t ever coming home. She’d wailed so loud that moths flew in and nestled deep in her stomach. She didn’t cry when Pop died a few months later. She kept her mouth closed, lest something else decided to join those moths."

Read an extract from Clatter Tongue, a story by Karen Wylde from This All Come Back Now: An anthology of First Nations speculative fiction edited by Mykaela Saunders.