Beginning

I have been wondering how to begin this journal.

There is always a temptation to start with something polished: a clear explanation of who I am, what my work is about and where it is all heading. But that would be dishonest. Most days in the studio, I don’t know exactly where the work is heading. I find out by making it.

At the moment, I am working towards an exhibition in December.

The work begins with grief, but I don’t want it to end there.

I am making seventeen pieces—one for each year my son Kyan would have been alive. He died when he was twelve. The number gives the exhibition a structure, but it also makes visible something I live with every day: time has continued, even though he has not continued within it.

Much of the work is in charcoal.

I am drawn to charcoal because it is unstable. It can be pressed heavily into the paper or reduced to something barely there. It smudges, lifts and travels. It can make a solid body, then allow that body to disappear at its edges. It feels closer to grief than paint sometimes does: physical, dirty, fragile and difficult to contain.

The earliest works for this exhibition have carried a great deal of weight. Bodies fold, brace and yield. Faces emerge and vanish. There are expanses of darkness, interrupted by skin, light or the suggestion of movement.

Lately, however, I have begun to ask what else must enter the work.

Not resolution. Not a comforting idea that grief eventually becomes something beautiful. I don’t believe that, and I don’t want to make work that pretends it is true.

But perhaps there can be a moment of noticing.

A slight opening. A small disturbance in the darkness. Something living that has not asked permission to appear.

I am interested in the almost-imperceptible moments that call us back into the world: light moving across a wall, a seed caught in the air, the warmth of another person beside us, a piece of music, the sudden recognition that something is still beautiful.

These things do not cancel grief. They exist beside it.

Perhaps choosing to live is not one decisive act. Perhaps it is made from thousands of these small moments, moments in which we notice the world and, for a second, allow it to reach us.

That is where the work is now.

This journal will be a record of what happens next: the pieces that work, the ones that don’t, the decisions I change my mind about, and the thoughts that only become clear once they are on the paper.

I don’t know yet what the finished exhibition will say.

I am beginning here.