Topography of Grief

This body of work, entitled “Topography of Grief” strives to chronicle the non prescriptive way I have experienced the loss and unexpected change that grief brought me. The work is made up of consistently shaped “windows” that examine magnified texture and color. These elements are anchors to traumatic memory. When we all experience life altering events our brains store fragments of sensory information from the time of the trauma. Smells, sounds, tastes, color and texture. Topography is defined as the arrangement of the natural and artificial physical elements of an area. This body of work examines those elements, both natural (expected, understandable, organic) and artificial (unexpected, horrifying, fabricated) through imagery that is expressly linked to my own sense memories in the months and years following a specific loss. In the process of examining this grief, and realizing that grief is a miasma without clearly defined edges separating the individuals we lose, the changes life brings, and the empathetic sorrow we feel for injustices beyond our control; I wanted to scoop from the tornado of memories a few moments to investigate closer. Rendering these memories magnified and still has become a ritual meditation on both the subject of the grief, and of the process of grieving itself.