A MYTHOLOGY OF MOURNING

 

The black sun is a paradox. It is blacker than black, but it also shines with a dark luminescence that opens the way to the most numinous aspects of psychic life.

Black Sun

Inside the ash tree at the far end of the memorial garden is an icy cold dark space. The blackness is so deep and so cold is spills out into the garden and can be felt mixing with the warm air. The hole is lined with a glowing luminous green moss. The darkness beckons you in, pulls you towards it like an event horizon around a black hole. It is the entrance to an ancient well. The roots of the 200-foot ash tree entwine around it holding it firmly in place. Five small stone steps lead downwards towards its inky black water. Sorrow connects me to something profoundly beautiful I can’t describe in words. My relationship as mother to a dead child exists in poetry, metaphor and artwork. This is where we communicate. It is driven by longing.

Working intuitively with materials such as clay, dust, drawing, sound and video I am able to tell my story of loss and grief.  Poetry and metaphor emerge from this internal void, this empty womb that allow me to create a mythology around death and mourning. At the bottom of the well I imagine a woman living down there. The mourner. A lonely figure residing in the well examining the bones of the dead as they pass through, a gate keeper to the underworld lamenting the sous of the dead.

 Through lived experience of traumatic grief a deeply symbolic mythology has emerged. A mythology of the mourner as a character who as a vessel has the capacity to hold within her the grief of the world. She is as an archetype, a conduit, allowing sorrow to pass through her body and into the dark water of the well. She is the mother of mourning and able to express the sorrows of those grieving. She utters raw unearthly sound lamenting the loss of family and friends bathing their souls in the often beautiful sounds of grief. It is sound that you hear on the inside. She has the ability to channel the grief of a community. She is not afraid of the sound of grief.

 I Imagine there is an umbilical cord that stretches down into the depths of the well connecting me to the emptiness felt in my womb, the black space of the well. From this place of poetic dreaming images emerge. I work intuitively with charcoal on paper. The circular charcoal drawings have the feel of sonography, ultrasound waves scanning an internal empty space anticipating an echo. Things appear. Looking into the dark well water and drawing the fleeting forms that emerge also draws on magical practices relating to methods of divination such as scrying, where a medium would look into a vessel containing water in the hope of receiving a vision. The well as a metaphor has become a deep internal space, a site of excavation, and a meditation on the depth of grief. There is an echo in the well, it is the echo of longing, of grief, of calling out into the darkness and hearing your own voice bounce back to you.  

Lucy Willow, 2023

Academic employment

Current Senior Lecturer Fine Art Sculpture, Falmouth University (2012-)

 Selected exhibitions

2022 Drawn from the Well, Grays Wharf Gallery, Penryn

2019 ANTIfestival, Kuopio, Finalnd     

2019 SOLITUDE: Picture Room, Newlyn Art Gallery     

2018 MANY AND BEAUTIFUL THINGS: Newlyn Art Gallery and the Exchange        

2018 AT SEA AGAIN: Artist Led Project, Lamorna Village Hall, St.Just, Clarence House PZ       

2017 TEARS OF THINGS: Exchange Gallery, Penzance        

2016 INTERLUDE: Solo Exhibition, Guangzhou, China     

2016 LOST FOR WORDS: project Room, Falmouth University     

2015 DUST: Picture Room, Newlyn Art Gallery     

2014 UNSETTLED: ENYS HOUSE     

2014 FALLEN: KESTLE BARTON, solo show    

2013 PRIMORDIAL DARKNESS: Picture Room, Newlyn Art Gallery     

2013 DARK ROOMS: The Cast Institute, Helston        

2011 GHOSTS OF GONE BIRDS: Liverpool School of Art        

2011 ABUNDANCE: Kestle Barton, Cornwall        

2009 GLORIA: Shoreditch, London     

2009 WASTELANDS: Newlyn Art Gallery     

2009 MEMENTO MORI, Solo Exhibition, Millennium, St.Ives     

2007 REVOLVER: PZ Gallery                 

2007 Canary in the attic: solo show, Salt Gallery, Hayle          

2007 ART NOW: Tate St.Ives    

2006 Twisted: Here Gallery, Bristol         

2006 Art in Hotels, Brighton Fringe Festival   

2006 Make it real, Whitstable, Kent  

2005 Transition 6, Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall     

2005 Art in Romney Marsh, 2005    

2004 Smithfield Abattoir, Wrestling With Angels, London  

2004 Taxi Gallery, Cambridge     

2002 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

Artist in Residence

2016 AIP INTERNATIONAL RESIDENCY 1 MONTH, Guangzhou, China     

2015 HERE ARTIST RESIDENCY Iceland 1 month residency     

 2013 Kestle Barton, Rural Centre for Contemporary Arts        

 

Publications

Malady and Mortality: Illness, Disease and Death in Literary and Visual Culture       
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/malady-and-mortality                                     

 

Conference Papers

2022 Death and Culture 1V, York University

Paper: The Dust of Objects

2018 Remember Me The Changing Face of Memorialisation, Hull

Paper: At Sea Again, The Shifting Memorial Ground.     

2013 Malady and Mortality, Falmouth University                

Paper: Transience: exploring the relationship between ephemerality, mourning and loss through dust and place.