Is grief a useful emotion? This is without a doubt the wrong question, a question that defeats its own asking instinct: is our grief any kind of response to living on a planet whose vulnerability is daily realized, whose futurity seems to melt一 or collapse一 into impossibility? Can this form of preemptive grief intervene in such a future, and preclude its own necessity? Or does it simply mark us as being in the world, as being of the world, mark witnessing, love, and bare mortality in an age of environmental exhaustion?

The landscapes and models created over the course of this residency took as their departure point grief as an affect that cants and colours the ambient character of our encountering the world. What arises? There is some pain, some acute discomfort, yes, but primarily estrangement, uncertainty. Alienation sets in, result of the dissonance between experiential immediacy and the cognitive一 maybe pre-cognitive一 projection of loss. We throw our grief outwardly, over that which we cannot bear to lose, and in doing so partially obscure it in the present.

It could be said that the prototypical aesthetic or experiential relationship between the sensing being and the world一 without intention to reify or reinscribe any archaic ontological binary一 is no longer sublimity, but solastalgia.

Among my intentions and among some of the difficulties of treating grief as something representable is in applying pressure to a defeatist, as well as limited, visual language of achromia and despair. Instead, effort and interest tended towards thinking grief as a gesture and an emotional entity indexing profound care for another being, many other beings, or the world as a whole. I tried to develop a certain visual vocabulary of care, caring acts, and caring gestures, to address the uneasiness of the affective ground.

Shrouding, balming, coating, protecting: can grief be a liquid? A cloth? Mucosal? A caress? A healing act, constitutively, is towards a wound. It acknowledges a harm before enveloping it. Can grief, as an orientation of care, be adequate to the wounded world it addresses? Unquestionably一 no. It is a mark of individual rupture in the face of political cruelties and unthinkable scales of universal co-implication. Grief is not an adequate response. It is a human one.