Death, Grief, and Faerie

Artist Statement

Death, Grief, and Faerie follows both my journey through the grief of losing my mother to cancer in November of 2020, and her journey, as I imagine it, through processing her own death in the afterlife.  As she was half Irish, in this work I employ Fae beings from Irish folklore as a means of integrating the experience of death from both the points of view of the living and the recently dead.

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These ink on paper works are illustrative in nature, as they follow the arcs both of my lived experience, and of an imagined journey through death as aided and facilitated by Faerie beings.  From a reluctant banshee announcing my mother’s death as I sleep on her couch in the next room, to her devastated spirit clinging her ashes, unwilling to cross the waters to separating our world from the next, to finally a Sidhe warrior carrying her across the waves as she drops the urn into the sea, bound for the land of the dead and of the Fae, these pieces traverse a journey of trauma, integration, and healing that both my mother and I share- albeit from entirely different perspectives.