Grieving (and) Weaving (and) Spreading (and) Becoming

Our interactions with personal ephemera - a home, a recovered letter, an expired bank card, an arranged breakfast table, a church stained glass window, an enclosed corner, your mother’s rosary, a childhood bedroom - give way to the psychological investigations of the self. In this thesis paper, Grieving (and) Weaving (and) Spreading (and) Becoming, I will explore my practice of subverting and incorporating found images, video, Slavic motifs, text and text(iles) in a disembodied search for identity, reconnection and softness. My arts-informed research project uses weaving methodologies, our personal archives among the discourse of grief, trauma, the domestic space, ritual, religion and gendered domestic labour. Through works of embroidery, image-making, performance, installation this paper aims to include a “distraction-as-ceremony” based methodology, similar to weaving methodologies, as a form of reconnection to our roots and our identities. In this paper, I will be using my Polish heritage as reference. In what ways can recreating, assembling, manipulating ephemera, space, language and the archive be used as a tool for a softer, slower, more patient future?