Constellations (2024)

Constellations is a lightbox installation weaving together poetry and collage, re-membering (reassembling) stigmatized deaths such as postpartum suicide and hoarding.

Drawing on my family history, the installation reflects on disenfranchised grief, catalyzed by my mother’s postpartum suicide and my father's hoarding. Through heirlooms, memory fragments, and ephemera, I explore how constellations can serve as metaphors for navigating grief. The work transforms fragments into a “collage as memoir,” highlighting that grief is nonlinear yet navigable through compassionate engagement.

Constellations encourages reflection on how grief is processed and held. In an attempt to express what is inexpressible in my personal history (the loss of a mother to suicide) my writing and artwork responds to this history of not-knowing by turning to the family home, the place where she died, to listen, and to imagine other possibilities of thinking about suicide beyond failure but rather as an opportunity for creation. Much of the artwork was created in collaboration with my father before his death in 2020 as well as the archive of my mother’s artwork through palimpsest of time and place.

The objects I began to excavate, like an archeologist, were ripe with stories, objects for obituaries untold, their silence was louder than any published elegy or memorial. I began to reflect on the objects as potential material elegies at a time when the pandemic changed our most established mortuary and memorial practices “funerals were forbidden, farewell rituals collapsed onto screens” (Anderssen). The excavation process brought me to a larger research-creation questions about disenfranchised grief and artistic memorial practices can play a constructive role during times of collective and personal trauma and its aftermath. 

His found art and writings, often scribbled on scrap paper (electricity bill envelopes) during bouts of insomnia, reflect a desire to connect while navigating multiple timelines, symbolizing a cosmic citizen's journey through grief as transformation. Through these pieces, Constellations reclaims stigmatized forms of loss, fostering dialogues on how endings can lead to new beginnings through shared memory and engagement.