Tracing the Guts of a Ghost
XPACE, October 2019
Familiar and strange: estranged. Hiding behind curtains and plastic furniture coverings. What is present but never named? How can we grieve the death of family itself?
A ritual of mourning creates a passageway through loss into healing. Tracing the Guts of a Ghost is the product of a journey to the feet of the lost mother. Through the use of mouldmaking as an act of care in the face of fear and the unknown, the work attempts to resolve the unresolved by speaking the unspoken. Exploring how life walks in inquisitive meditation alongside death, rather than racing anxiously ahead. What knowledge can be lost in death, leaving silent impressions within our body and intricate heirlooms in our behavior?
As a work of witnessing, the work acknowledges public grieving and a ritual of ruins: A practice of presence which creates the possibility of healing.
By tracing the guts of the ghost, we learn how to grieve.
Exhibition Essay by Clementine Morrigan
Photo credit: Polina Teif