Katrina Walker
Grief and Love are Forever Intertwined — The Pains and Pleasures of Mourning AAD Dissertation Studio 2 2019–20
Extracts from Katrina Walker, Grief and Love are Forever Intertwined: The Pains and Pleasures of Mourning
Dissertation Studio 15 Souvenir Tutor: Lesley Stevenson
School of Art, Architecture and Design London Metropolitan University 2020
THE TRACE
Jennifer Gonzàlez focuses on private narratives, particularly with objects becoming symbolic of a person. She coins it autotopography – ‘a private-yet-material memory landscape’ (Gonzàlez, 1995: 133), a physical ‘representation of memory and identity’ (Gonzàlez, 1995: 146). If we consider hairwork and post-mortem photography, these traditions show undeniable evidence of a person’s existence and provide unambiguous information of the deceased – such as hair colour, face shape, height, etc. It is a public history, inarguable facts about the person whose being has been preserved for posterity. However, the everyday objects that we accumulate through our own lifetimes offer just as much personal information, but this is not readily understood by outsiders – they are bound with private narratives. Gonzàlez (1995) makes links between clothing and scent, furniture to bodily imprints and jewellery showing signs of wear, noting them as being the less obvious traces of our existence. ‘Death reconstructs our experience of personal and household objects’ (Gibson, 2008: 1) and our recognition of these traces that outlive our loved ones, results in primary functions being disregarded as they become more poignant possessions, which we connect with in our times of sorrow. It is these remnants of our existence that I will be looking at in this chapter, exploring the ways in which we use and preserve these traces of our loved ones, using my own experience with loss and relationships with objects. In the immediate days following her death – and for some time after that – I denied myself the time to grieve for my grandmother. I didn’t allow myself the time to cry, to be with my sadness and mourn my loss, because for me it felt that to start grieving meant I would eventually stop and that was – and still is – my biggest fear; a deep fear of evanescence. Perhaps this is where the sadist-like behaviour comes from? To purposefully cause this kind of pain can be a way of solidifying that one is in fact still hurting from the loss and that the love for those who have passed away is not lost. ‘Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love’ (Cave, 2018) but it is also a welcome one.
Figure 5: (2019) Author's own image. Nanny's Memory Box. [Photograph]
The above image shows a private collection of ephemera that I have collected through the years. Instead of being displayed behind the glorious glass that I have previously mentioned, these items are kept in dull, sombre box. They were previously part of a larger collection of stuff, which I had filtered through and collated to curate this collection – a memory box for my Nanny. Each item in the memory box connects me to her in some way, holding different narratives that would be overlooked by the public but are invaluable to me. As Sherry Turkle (2007) depicts her family keepsakes as being a key to her own understanding of her lost father, this collection has become an emotional bricolage for my Nanny, where each featured item acts as a souvenir of the past, evidence of the relationship I shared with her. I felt an urge to gather these items together, which, at first, I couldn’t understand exactly why but now it seems to me that this urge was in fact a mechanism I built for myself to thwart any possibility of her memory fading. Resonating with Aristotle’s idea in his ‘Poetics’ (c.335 BC), the ephemera is now a concentrated collection of memorabilia and the process of reorganising echoes Boym’s theory of a restorative form of nostalgia: an attempt at a ‘transhistorical reconstruction of the home’ (Boym, 2001: 14) where, in this context, the home is metaphorical - it is an act of a compulsive need to reconstruct and return to what is ultimately an unsatisfiable want. To look back at the memory box provides bittersweet feeling; it evokes the most wonderful of memories, but it almost always comes with a huge pang of pain and an overwhelming wave of grief. I continue to knowingly subject myself to this pain – it is a torture that is gratifying. DeLourne observes this self-subjection as an ‘obsessive need’ and a ‘universal, sometimes overwhelming, compulsion’ (DeLourne, 2004: 125). Freud (1917) also notes this obsessive self-torment as a form of sadism, just as Navarro recognises with hairwork and as I have through unearthing my fear. It is an act that is carried out at a ‘great expense of time and cathartic energy’ (Freud, 1917: 245), yet it is something that is instinctual and feels necessary, despite the suffering it causes.
PHOTOGRAPHS
Since its invention, photography and memory have always been linked. The first commercially successful process in the 19th Century, the daguerreotype, was popular in the Victorian era particularly for post-mortem photography. As it was the first of its kind, the process was naturally very costly and therefore a luxury. Families who did not come from wealthy backgrounds would often only hire a photographer to capture the faces of loved ones after their passing. These photos would be the only images of them. Because of such costs, many post-mortem photographs would have all members of the family present in the shot to avoid having to pay for more photos later. Where paintings are able to ‘feign reality’ (Barthes, 200: 76) photos certify an existence, they are indexical proof that these people once existed and as the photos outlive the subjects, photography seems to be an ‘imperious sign of future death’ (Barthes, 2000: 97). We tend to look to photos as tools – mnemonic devices – that we use to keep the past alive in our memories. This often ignites that feeling of nostalgia that Boym talks about – the desire to return to a time as opposed to a place – and we begin to recognise that the moments captured can never reoccur and thus we are faced with the promise of death; it points to both those we have already lost that cannot return and ourselves as we will eventually succumb to our own mortality. It is important to note that photos that do not depict such explicit links to death – as Serrano’s collection does – still function as memento mori. As we print our favourite photos onto glossy paper which emulates the shine of glass, we see the present immediately becoming the past; it ‘produces death while trying to preserve life’ (Barthes, 2000: 92). However, that shiny surface continues to act as a smokescreen keeping us focused on the past so that we do not face our promise.
In part two of Barthes’ Camera Lucida (2000), we read an account of a deeply personal journey through grief; of Barthes’ mourning his late mother. He talks of the many photographs he sifts through in an attempt to find the one that is right. Barthes finds his recognition of his late mother in a photograph he titles the ‘Winter Garden Photograph’ (Barthes, 2000: 70). The image is of his mother as a little girl, before he knew her – long before he himself was born – but, nevertheless, it is what he finds to be a true representation of her. However, he resists to reveal the Winter Garden photo that moved him so much as we could never read the photo in the same way that he does. Instead, Barthes seems to invite us to place our own image of grief within the blunted corners that he speaks so fondly of. I have lots of photos of my Nanny that I could fit within his Winter Garden frame: selfies that we took together, photos of me as a new-born in her arms, beautiful candid portraits of her that I was lucky to capture on the days I’d stay with her, photos of her on her wedding day with my Grandad, and photos of her as a young girl. As Barthes talks of a desire to enlarge the photo of his mother, to understand it better and know its truth, believing that to enlarge the details will enable him to ‘reach [his] mother’s very being’ (Barthes, 2000: 99), I compare this to the relationship I have with each of the photos I have of my Nanny; I set them as the lock screen on my laptop and mobile, I post them on my social media, I include them in my work, I have frames that have been specially engraved to hold, display and protect my favourite photos of her. I plaster them in all possible areas of my life, a display of love, pride and deep unrelenting grief, an act against evanescence. I loved – love – her so much that even the notion of not remembering her voice, smell, the shape of her face and all the elements that make her her, is hugely distressing. But maybe this is ultimately an act that comes from trying to physically reach her, to bring her back to me. On the indexicality of photographs, Barthes notes that it cannot necessarily ‘say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been’ (Barthes, 2000: 85). Perhaps this is why photography is so heavily relied on following the death of a loved one – like hairwork, printed photos are tangible items that keep the deceased present in our lives. Photography enables us to uphold our denial defence mechanism in the initial stages of grieving; we do not need to face the reality of death when photography allows us to believe that a person has not died because they are still visible; it ‘allow[s] me to believe that what is missing is present all the same, even though I know it is not the case’ (Durand, 1995, cited in Batchen, 2004: 41). Barthes identifies this as a ‘perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live’ (Barthes, 2000: 79), as a photo can guarantee an existence but does not always confirm a death; it is another example of the smokescreen that we put up to shield our fantasy from reality. Kuhn talks of memory work with photography; considering the human subject(s), the context of the photo’s production – ‘where, when, how, by whom and why was the photo taken?’ (Kuhn, 1995: 8) – the way the photo was made, and the context in which the image was made for – who was it made for? Who has it now? Using these guidelines that Kuhn suggests, I am able to know and understand more about the photos in my collection. The photo below was taken in the April of 1940 and shows my Great-Grandparents, my Great-Aunt, and my Nanny. The photo has been stamped with ‘Jerome’ – a popular photography studio from the 1900s; the studio that captured this image. It’s possible that the crown insignia was used by Jerome for photographs of those in their armed service uniforms (Fisher, 2019). It is this logo and the date stamp on the back begin to furbish the photo – it provides historical context. During the Second World War, Jerome was seen as a necessity for being a ‘morale booster’ (Fisher, 2019) and were allowed to keep business open as usual. Jerome’s photography enabled loved ones to swap images with each other prior to being parted from one another for an undisclosed amount of time. Just as Barthes’
(2000) points out the confusion between death and life, the medium has the ability to confuse the here and there – it has the ability to eliminate the distance between one another.
Figure 6: Author’s own image (1940) My Nanny, Great-Aunt and Great-Grandparents, 2nd April 1940. [Photograph]
Like Barthes, I recognise my Nanny in images that were from a time before my existence and feel connected to her through these. As well as utilising Kuhn’s memory work to discover the historical context, these photos of my Nanny as a little girl are embellished by the many stories that she would tell me – they feel almost as if they are my memories. Looking at this photo captured by Jerome, I hear her words: ‘I was only two when war broke out’. I remember her stories of my Great-Grandad, Tom, and Great-Grandmother, Nancy; I feel as though I know them, although we never met. I recognise my Great-Aunt Betty more as a young girl than I do as the 90-year-old woman she is today. The traces in these photos do not only certify that they once existed but – along with the stories – they make them present in the lives of those who never had the opportunity to meet them. The final step in Kuhn’s
memory work questions where it is the photograph resides now and, in this example, the photo is proudly placed on a mantlepiece in an ornate frame. It preserves the stories and faces of ancestors never met for posterity, but we mustn’t forget there is a pain that comes from separation in war that is hidden behind glass – a pain I recognise from what I know of the image, that outsiders may never know.
HANDWRITING
Figure 7: (c.1940) Author’s own image. My Great-Grandmother’s Handwriting on the Back of a Photograph. [Handwriting on the back of a Photograph]
Whilst looking through my archive of photos, I unframed another image of my Nanny, her mother and her sister, and discovered a handwritten note on the back from my Great-Grandmother to my GreatGrandfather during the Second World War. This trace of her feels more precious than the photo itself as it is far more than just handwriting; it is a surviving record of her thoughts– it is not of her, but a part of her – shared with me 80 years later. Handwriting alongside a photo gives us permission even more so to believe our loved ones are with us still as we can not only see them, but we can now hear them. Following the death of my Nanny, I found myself deeply attached to a letter she wrote to me in 2012 – 6 years prior to her death. It feels more poignant now. Despite the words being written down, the handwriting evokes the senses – I am able to hear her voice – and I have been able to translate it further to fulfil the need of the body; like Barthes and his desire to enlarge the Winter Garden photo, I have taken the final line – ‘Love you lots & lots’ – and had it engraved on a ring that I never take off. I want to hear her everywhere I go, and this one line I know was written for me only.
Figure 8: Author’s own image (2012) Dear Katrina, love from Nan. [Letter]
Figure 9: Author’s own image (2018) Eternal Love. [Photograph]
‌ School of Art, Architecture and Design London Metropolitan University 2020
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