In March this year I exhibited one of the grief pieces I have been exploring as part of the off-page visual poetry collective, alongside a group of 15 other artists/poet creatives offpagevispo | Instagram | Linktree.
The work, ‘’presence of absence (triptych)’ explores the difficulty I experienced in using language to express feelings of loss and absence after the death of my partner, Billy, in 2021. It was an interesting experience taking the poem off the page and into a wonderful small gallery, Many Studios, in the heart of the Trongate.
All expressions in the poem derive from within the single word ‘gone’.
The first panel [handwritten] came to me as a single-word dream, a block-text, all pervasive, impenetrable, awful. Versions of ‘goneness’ then continually suggested themselves.
The second panel [disintegration] excavates the word ‘gone’, fragments of the word appearing and repeating as cry, lament, elegy.
The third panel [ghosttext], offers another iteration of grief, fading but never disappearing, ghostly forms scattered across time and space, a sense of loss continually disappearing and re-emerging, unexpectedly.
Also included was a museum label [gravestone] as an anchor/pathfinder to the work.
Visitors were invited to record and share their own experiences of ‘goneness’ (and/or your responses to the work), leaving these in the urn at the base of the exhibit.
These are part of an ongoing project and continued conversation about loss.
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