Living with Grief

The goal of this project is to visualize the fact that grief is not something that you get through, overcome or finish. Grief is something that you have to learn to integrate it into your life and learn to live with it. Some days grief can be a distant echo in the back of your mind, some days grief is a whisper of memory when you smell something, hear something or see something.  Some days grief can take you out at the knees and cause a train wreck inside you.  This project aims to visually represent the forms of grief and to encourage people to talk about and share their grief. The hope is that this work will spawn conversations where in the past there was silence, shame or a taboo subject.

The images will consist of scenes depicting everyday life and the subject (representing the viewer) going through it. Within the same frame will be digital composites of the same subject fully naked (representing their raw grief that is unable to be covered up or disguised). The representation of grief will show the many facets of the grieving process (curled up in a ball, sitting calmly across a table, raging in anger throwing things around, laughing, hugging the subject, etc.

This work will take careful planning to capture the location by itself, the viewer subject going about the mundane and the grief subject reacting in multiple ways. The final result may be a printed book or photographic prints in a art showing.