My family just made a camping trip to Great Blue Heron Provincial Park, located 45 minutes north of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. It was a treat to leave the city for a while and reconnect with the outdoors.

We spent much of our time hiking, which in retrospect was too much activity — we each wished we had another day there to spend doing nothing. It was our first time up there, and there was so much to explore that it was hard to stay still. We’ve learned for next time.

While Saskatchewan still doesn’t give me a feeling of home despite having lived here for half my life now, I thoroughly appreciate it. Up here in the almost-north, the lakes and trees do give me much. Maybe home for me isn’t necessarily British Columbia as much as it is water.

I also thought about how irrelevant provincial borders are when considering the larger systems this land is a part of. For instance, at the trailhead of a hike in Prince Albert National Park, just next to Great Blue Heron, I was reminded of the ice age that shaped this landscape. A temperature shift of five degrees Celsius covered all of Canada in thousands of feet of snow.

I paused to consider the current climactic changes we’re causing and those projected for the relatively near future—some predictions of five or even eight-degree heating. On top of that, Canada’s temperatures are rising at twice the speed of global averages. While I’ve recently felt somewhat more hopeful when Regina, my own small city (pop 229K), approved their fairly ambitious Energy and Sustainability Framework, aiming to keep us in line with the Paris Agreement, I still recognize that the world is past the eleventh hour, and temperature shifts such as the one that caused the last ice age are most likely already inevitable. My non-stop daily dilemmas about how to reduce my footprint are laughable.

Still, we’re here and now, and despite reminders of this crisis all around, I tried really hard on this trip to find calm in seeing the life and death that was all around. We saw 41 bird species, white-tailed and mule deer, a fox, a young moose, and uncountable other wonders on the forest floor.

I also saw my son, Jakob, relaxed. This was a treat, as his own burgeoning anxieties about our current and future world normally weigh him down.

Even here, away from world news (which was particularly awful this past weekend, I learned upon my return), our anxieties were still in the background. I couldn’t shake the tension that I experience physically in my neck, back, and (oddly?), forearms. I tried taking deep breaths and lowering my shoulders, but it didn’t work. My mind wouldn’t stop. I was there but not there.

Jakob too was obviously still processing some heavy stuff. The epic story he told me as we walked several hours each day involved a gentlemanly protagonist, Toby (our cat), dealing with a barbarian invasion amid a plague called kittypox. Just before leaving, we’d seen the news of monkeypox, clearly on Jakob’s mind. It’s strange to be out on a beautiful hike, marveling at your your child’s creativity and skill at storytelling (he’s a budding writer, taking after his dad), also aware that planted in his narrative are fears of disease and social collapse.

Back at home while we were away, I had a fellow MFA student, Sabine Wecker, water a test piece I got started before leaving.

This is an alternate version of a cast I made of Jakob’s face with an extremely thin clay slip. It’s the same local clay body, just presented differently.

I’m still having difficulty understanding what I’m trying to get at with this work, and I’m still not sure it’s the direction I should be taking. I didn’t have the time alone I’d hoped for on this trip to think more about this either, so I’ll have to leave off once again with a promise to myself to figure something out by next week.

I wrote last week about the connection between ephemeral art and mourning, reflecting on Mary O’Neill’s “Ephemeral Art: Mourning and Loss.” One of O’Neill’s citations that I found most helpful came from Freud’s essay “On Transience.” I figure that if I’m now going to cite Freud, I should do so from his original writing, so I went and picked up volume 14 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Thank god for libraries. After gobbling up “On Transience” (it’s only three pages), I moved onto Mourning and Melancholia. From it, I learned that according to Sigmund, surprise surprise, my melancholia (aka clinical depression) is indeed connected to narcissism, regression, an oral cannibalistic phase of libidinal development, mania, hysteria, sadism, and yes, anal erotism. I feel a whole lot better now, knowing this.

While I stand with many in not agreeing with everything Freud has to say, I have respect his intelligence and much of his understanding of the human condition. A few of his beliefs on melancholia are precise from my experience.

I’ve been concerned that this reading may be a sidetrack from my project for this term, but I’m pretty sure it make sense to spend time here. O’Neill (and many others) write that ephemeral art-making (often) stems from experiences of mourning. So, I’m confident in my reason for making ephemeral work, as I certainly believe I’ve been in a state of mourning over the loss of natural places I love since my trip to BC last summer. Why, though, am I experiencing this? I’m often asked why climate change affects me so strongly, and I don’t have any good, quick answers. People often tell me that this effect climate change has on me has more to do with my own weakness or illness—it’s some kind of psychosis—as to them it’s unnatural and unhealthy to care as much as I do about the situation (as if this existential threat should not be terrifying and tragic). How should I respond to them? More importantly, I need to sort this out for myself. So, it’s time to try a bit of psychoanalysis, as much as one can perform it on oneself, which may be not at all, to see if it will give me insight into my work.

^{My son and I about to go for a swim on Gabriola Island (2015) (photo credit Michael Trussler); fire burning by a highway in BC (2021)}

My first question is, why am I such a nature lover? In “On Transience,” Freud writes,

“We possess, as it seems, a certain amount of capacity for love—what we call libido—which in the earliest stages of development is directed towards our own ego. Later, though still at a very early time, this libido is diverted from the ego on to objects, which are thus in a sense taken into our ego. If the objects are destroyed or if they are lost to us, our capacity for love (our libido) is once more liberated; and it can then either take other objects instead or can temporarily return to the ego.

^{“_{On Transience,” 306}}

I’m not sure how convinced I am of this limit to one’s capacity for love, but relating the above to my own history is interesting. I grew up alone with my severely mentally ill mother. She couldn’t take care of either of us, and so I had to take care of us both. She had (and still has), among other things, extreme OCD. Hers manifested itself mostly in the form of rituals surrounding every minutia of daily living. Each task (dressing, closing a bottle lid, taking medications) had its own set ritual, always involving a vocalization of information (a visual description of each pill before swallowing it, for example) that would spill out of her in a kind of song she’d repeat in sets of four. Needless to say, it was a huge effort for her to leave the house (and she could never, ever, get anywhere remotely on time). She never held a job, and it’s only because of her parents generosity that she didn’t end up on the street. Our apartment was packed full with mail that would be too time consuming and stressful for her to open, and other clutter and filth too—laundry, bags of used Depends, breakfast dishes going moldy in the sink. We couldn’t cook because every surface of the kitchen was covered in stuff, so I grew up largely on McDonald’s and family restaurants open late. I gradually stopped going to school. The principal sent letters home, but my Mom rarely opened them. If she did and tried to tell me to go to school (or to do anything), I’d tell her to fuck off. She’d sometimes tell me she’d kill herself if I went out with my friends, and I’d still leave. (I always came home though, and always put my Mom to bed.) I said and did many awful things to her over the years that I regret, but I understand this period of my life now in a way I didn’t then, and I don’t blame myself. I was filled with rage and loneliness. I believe the rest of my family knew enough to at least have asked the right questions, but they never did. No one came to my rescue. I didn’t graduate with my class, and it’s really only because of my drive to travel that I got myself together enough to return to school and move out of that situation. It was one in which no child should be placed. I’ve been diagnosed with PTSD as a result of living in a state of trauma throughout my developmental years. I’m certain this trauma physically affected my brain’s development, and that my severe struggles with forming long-term memories is one result.

I could write more, but the point I’m getting at is this: for three weeks each summer between the ages of 10 to 15, I got to escape from all of the above and spend time at a hippy-loving summer camp on the gloriously beautiful Gabriola Island off the gulf of British Columbia; I believe I directed my libido (my love) to this place and all the world’s natural beauty that it showed me. Now, as I see this “object” being destroyed, I suppose that libido should be “liberated” and that I should, according to Freud, direct it towards something else. More on how that’s going, later.

^{Jelly fish at Galiano Island (2015); water put out along a BC highway due to encroaching forest fires (2021)}

One more part of “On Transience” that interested me was Freud’s mention of the war, and how

It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization […]. [It] let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed for ever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds. […] It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless.

“_{^{On Transience,” 307}}

Some of what Freud’s saying here can also apply to anthropogenic climate change today. Climate change is, after all, an example of what Rob Nixon refers to as slow violence, “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). Thinking of this violence, this unseen and slow-moving war, I too feel let down by my species, and most especially (because not everyone is to blame), I feel let down by those in positions of authority. My pride in the “achievements of our civilization” was long ago shattered by my awareness of the disgusting history that led us here. To me, this is another instance of neglect and abandonment. Why aren’t our governments coming to the rescue? In this case, they (we) have abandoned ethics; they (we) have abandoned the right to life and freedom of others, and they (we) have abandoned the planet. The “strong moral compass” I’ve been told I have may stem from an intolerance I have of this behaviour. Why can’t we all just care?

A final point I’ll mention about my response to “On Transience” is less for the sake of a personal analysis and more to voice a point of disagreement I have with this text that I’d like to park here for future thought. Freud writes about the illogical assumption (of his poet friend who couldn’t enjoy their walk because of the knowledge that everything beautiful around them was going to die) that transience does not diminish beauty, in fact:

A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely. Nor can I understand any better why the beauty and perfection of a work of art or of an intellectual achievement should lose its worth because of its temporal limitations. A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues which we admire to-day will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the works of our poets and thinkers, or a geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon the earth ceases; but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration.

“On Transience,” 306 (emphasis mine)

I balk at this idea that the “value of all beauty and perfection” exists only in “our own emotional lives,” and so do many others. Recent reading I’ve done challenges it, as many consider non-humans capable of autonomous value and consciousness. For instance, in “Environmental Modernism: Ecocentric Conceptions of the Self and the Emotions in the Works of R.M. Rilke and W.B. Yeats,” Sabine Lenore Müller focuses on “the conception of an environmental, communal self, and the understanding of emotions as centred within ecosystems rather than within the human self” (40) and “the relinquishment of the privilege of considering the human body as the prime seat of emotions, thought and memory” (44). Müller notes that “the re-conception of emotions as shared environmental phenomena, is central to Rilkes [sic] entire oeuvre” (49). For instance, she brings in Rilke’s poem, “Der Tod des Dichters” (Death of the poet), in which the face of the poet “is described as a vast expanse, the environment itself, meadows and woods” (53-54). (I keep saying this, but I do need to write more about faces and my reason for bringing my son’s into my recent work. Maybe in my next post.) Anyways, what I’m suggesting in response to this passage from Freud is that the transience of natural beauty may mean something to more than just the human, and certainly when I consider this extinction event we’re causing, I mourn not only for what this loss means to my species. Also, again, I see a difference between the death of a single flower, which is an integral a part of life’s beautiful cycle, and the human-caused obliteration of species and ecosystems.

_{Dead tree sprouting new growth, Gabriola Island, 2015.}

There is yet another way of conceiving of emotions that I’m considering these days. Glenn Albrecht, the Australian philosopher who coined the term solastalgia, introduces his book, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World by saying,

Emotions are defined as “that which moves us” or affects us. Our universe is shaped by, and shapes with, powerful forces, and is the prime mover in both creating and destroying the conditions for life. In the most real sense, the universe is the source of all emotional force.

Earth Emotions, 1

He goes on to describe the key emotional forces that exist in the universe, namely terraphthora (Earth destoyer) and terranascia (Earth creator). These destructive and creative energies that exist in the universe are the same energies that exist in ourselves, leading to the range of feelings and behaviours from violence to love (2-3). As he puts it, seeing human life as an extension of the universe, we are “products of a larger system” and only “a tiny speck of life fighting against the entropic forces of destruction and decay” (3). There’s much here to think about, but what I’ll note for now is that these other writers (and I’ve named only two of so many) present arguments that at least appear to me to present challenges to Freud’s idea that “the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives.”

Like I said, I don’t agree with everything Freud had to say, but at the same time there is much in his work that I believe is accurate, and I can certainly place myself into much of what I’ve just read. Take for example his description of the melancholic, next to which I wrote in the marginalia of my photocopy of “Mourning and Melancholia,: “Me!”:

The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking in mourning—an extraordinary diminution of his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale. In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, in capable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished. He abases himself before everyone and commiserates with his own relatives for being connected with anyone so unworthy. He is not of the opinion that a change has taken place in him, but extends his self-criticism back over the past; he declares that he was never any better.

“Mourning and Melancholia,” 246.

In the fall, I fell into a state of severe depression that I’m still struggling to overcome. The above passage precisely articulates some of what I’ve been experiencing. I recall my supervisor, David Garneau, telling me that my belief that I’ve fooled my profs into giving me good grades in the past, and that I’ll never create anything again, was simply “a medical issue.” Fair enough (though I still believe some of what I believed then).

My next question is, why does the loss of beautiful places (and the broader issue of the climate emergency) affect me so much that it contributes to my experience of “a medical issue”? In other words, what is the cause of melancholia, according to Freud, and how is it distinct from mourning? To Freud, mourning is the absolutely clear and necessary process of redirecting one’s libido (love) from the lost person or object. This process takes time, but it always comes to an end. Where it becomes pathological is when this process does not end, and where it exhibits a few key differences from mourning, such as he describes in the following:

In one set of cases it is evident that melancholia too [as well as mourning] may be the reaction to the loss of a loved object. Where the exciting causes are different one can recognize that there is a loss of a more ideal kind. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love […]. In yet other cases, one feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of this kind has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either. This, indeed, might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him. This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious.

“Mourning and Melancholia,” 245

This ambivalence of the loss, as he describes it later, is likely a key component of what I and others experiencing solastalgia are facing. It is perhaps partially connected to what Mary O’Neill refers to as “ambiguous loss” (iii), one for which society does not have social recognition, or what botanist Phyllis Windle describes in “The Ecology of Grief.” As I wrote in an earlier post, Windle “explains that one reason it’s difficult to rid oneself of the distress caused by environmental degradation is that this very type of loss, unlike the loss of a loved one, is ambiguous: ‘Environmental losses are intermittent, chronic, cumulative, and without obvious beginnings and endings’ (365). I understand her point that it feels impossible to move forward from this place of grief when the situation is still unfolding, and in fact worsening.” There is no clear beginning and certainly no foreseeable end to the climate catastrophe. This ambiguity can be a part of the experience of ambivalence regarding environmental loss. Is there still room for hope? Is the future going to be as bleak as scientists continually claim? Other causes for ambivalence may also exist, of course. As Freud puts it, I know whom I’m losing (nature), but perhaps not what I am losing in him (why this loss is so relevant to me). My loss is possibly “withdrawn from consciousness,” and thus inaccessible to me through my own psychoanalysis.

I wrote above that as I see my “love object” being destroyed, a healthy response would be to liberate my libido and then direct it towards something else. This would be mourning. Melancholia, on the other hand, involves a process wherein “countless separate struggles are carried on over the object, in which hate and love contend with each other; the one seeks to detach the libido from the object, the other to maintain this position of the libido against the assault” (256).  

I’m aware that for me, love is complicated matter (I’m sure it is for most). Could it be that there’s something in me that needs my love-object to be destroyed, perhaps for fear of more abandonment, or perhaps out of anger? If so, am I actually, unconsciously of course, seeking to devote my libido to a doomed object? If so, why, and how does one fix that?

According to Freud, it’s likely a result of my trauma that I’m doing this to myself. It all comes back to the mother, of course:

traumatic experiences in connection with the object may have activated other repressed material [blocking mourning]. Thus everything to do with these struggles due to ambivalence remains withdrawn from consciousness, until the outcome characteristic of melancholia has set in. This, as we know, consists in the threatened libidinal cathexis [my placement of energy on objects other than myself] at length abandoning the object, only, however, to draw back to the place in the ego from which it had proceeded. So by taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction.

“Mourning and Melancholia,” 257

I like this phrase, that “love escapes extinction.” Maybe I cannot stand to lose that which I love (nature), so I’m harming myself instead to deny myself the proper acceptance of and mourning for that which I’m losing.

There are far too many possible reasons why I’m experiencing what Freud would call a pathological response to climate change to ponder here, but these have been a few I’ve found useful to put into words; importantly, to me, is also to think outside of this (in many ways outdated) viewpoint altogether and accept that a pathology may just be an appropriate response to the situation. Actually, to be fair to him, Freud asks in this essay, “why a man has to be ill to before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind” (246). If there is anything good that has come out of my illness, it’s greater awareness of a few “truths,” and I’m sure this will help me out eventually.

Works Cited:

Albrecht, Glenn. Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Cornell UP, 2019.

Freud, Sigmund. “On Transience,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14. London, 1957, pp. 305-307

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14. London, 1957, pp. 243-258.

Müller, Sabine Lenore, “Environmental Modernism: Ecocentric Conceptions of the Self and the Emotions in the Works of R.M. Rilke and W.B. Yeats.” From Ego to Eco: Mapping Shifts from Anthropocentrism to Ecocentrism. Edited by Sabine Lenore Muller and Tina-Karen Pusse. Brill, 2018.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2013.

O’Neill, Mary. “Ephemeral Art: Mourning and Loss.” Doctoral Thesis, Loughborough University, June 2007.

Windle, Phyllis. “The Ecology of Grief.” BioScience, vol. 15, no. 5, 1992, pp. 363-366.

In my previous post, I told the story of the work I’ve been doing lately and mentioned that I had more to say about the clay slip mold of my son’s face and what it conveys.

Really, I have a lot of thinking to do about the direction my work is going and my use of this material to create ephemeral forms in general. This semester, I’m taking a directed reading course with Lindsey French, so this is the perfect opportunity for me to try to understand what my work means to me and what I wish to say with it. This is critically important as I approach the time in my MFA program for developing my graduating exhibition, the equivalent of a thesis.

Browsing the aisles of the Archer library recently, I lucked out by pulling from the shelf (Im)permanence: Cultures in/out of Time. This is a book covering the proceedings of a conference of this title that took place to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Albert Einstein’s publication of his article on relativity. The conference, and this book, “examine the state of time as represented in the arts and in culture at the beginning of a new century” (5). In its intro, the editors state that,

[t]he late twentieth century has been called an era of ephemerality. One hundred years after Einstein, time became a fungible commodity, a matter of interpretation rather than of measurement. Artists all over the world seized on the idea of the impermanent, building transience into the form and content of their art. (6)

The chapter of this book that most interests me (and more than anything I’ve read in a long time), is Mary O’Neill’s “Ephemeral Art: Mourning and Loss.” As a way of getting started with this term’s reading and thinking, I’m going to connect several ideas from this chapter to my own thought and work processes.

O’Neill starts with a definition of ephemeral art as not simply temporary works, but “works in which the decay or disappearance of the work over the course of time is an intrinsic element of the piece. In these cases the decay and/or disappearance is intentional and is an essential aspect of what the work communicates” (88).

This connection O’Neill makes between ephemerality and mourning in this chapter is precisely how I’ve been thinking about my practice—the ephemeral nature of all of my works has been purposeful, melding content and form.

I was thrilled to see someone connect this type of work with the grieving process in the way O’Neill has done: “[E]phemerality is a means of communicating mourning and of bearing witness to the obsessive remembering associated with what Freud calls ‘grief work'” (88). For me, my work is about loss. It makes sense that on top of this work’s contextual layer of which I am consciously aware are other connections between this work and my grief. I hadn’t considered, for instance, that using this local material, even studying it closely, is likely an act of “obsessive remembering.” O’Neill later elaborates on the process of mourning:

“Mourning is the reaction to the loss of a loved one or an ideal, a belief, for example in truth or the immortality of one’s home or country. It refers to the painful process of relinquishing emotional ties to the lost person or object through a process of reality testing. This process involves periods of obsessive remembering, as the mourner seeks to conjure up the lost person and to replace him or her with an imaginary presence. This magical resurrection allows the mourner to prolong the existence of the lost person, which is the main object of Trauerarbeit (grief work). This is a very difficult and painful process made even more difficult by the fact that when we mourn the loss of another we are also mourning the loss of part of the self.” (92)

I appreciate that O’Neill recognizes that one can mourn an ideal or a belief, such as a belief in the immortality of one’s home. However, nowhere else in this chapter does O’Neill really stray into the area of environmental loss. Her focus throughout is on the loss of people or objects. In my practice, I’d like to expand on her work with this topic to consider the mourning needed as a result of environmental destruction. What, I wonder, does she have to say today about climate change and the in-our-face impermanence of everything alive right now (perhaps excluding fungi and waterbears)? I’d like to know what she and Glenn Albrecht, the Australian philosopher who coined the term solastalgia, would chat about.

My jaw dropped when I read of Freud’s poet friend in this chapter:

“In his 1915 essay On Transience Freud describes a conversation he had with a poet friend while out walking. The young poet was unable to enjoy the beauty of the scene surrounding him because of his awareness of the inevitable decay of all natural splendor, in fact the transience of everything, both natural and human creations. Freud states that this despondency is one of two possible reactions to the knowledge of the inevitability of death and decay, the other being a rebellion against the facts—an assertion of, or a demand for, immortality” (90).

I definitely suffer from the former response to my “knowledge of the inevitability of death and decay;” that is, my experience over the past year, since our summer of near-constant smoke and heat domes, mirrors that of Freud’s friend. A major setback in my recovery has been that nature, normally that great balm for emotional distress, is the very source of my grief, so spending time in it only triggers more pain. However, I’m not sure where my despondency really stems from exactly. Unlike for Freud’s friend, I don’t think that its cause is my own mortality, and neither am I bothered by the death of any particular individual tree or bird that I see. I fully recognize the necessity for death in nature, which includes my own. What saddens me is the loss we are seeing during this sixth mass-extinction event which we have caused. It’s the injustice and the huge loss, larger and faster than previous extinctions, that stops me in my tracks.

I’m not sure, in other words, where the usefulness of Freud ends in this conversation, as the world is now in an entirely different situation from the one in which he lived. O’Neill writes that “Freud’s description of the ‘old myth of redemption’ is particularly significant for our understanding of the need for permanence in relation to artworks. The myth of the immortality of art represents a victory of humankind over nature” (91). Okay, but what if one is quite certain that humankind, as a result of destroying nature, is in fact destroying itself? This notion of the “immortality of art” can’t apply in a world where there are no people left to view it. Or can it?

O’Neill writes that permanence is a requirement of the art world for both the institutions (adding to and preserving their collections) and to the art-makers (establishing themselves and ensuing their perpetual existence); however, “underlying this is a greater emotional need for our cultural objects to survive intact—we need to know that some things will always be safe, will always be ‘sacred,’ and that through them some part of ourselves will survive” (89). I’d say that we now know that nothing will be sacred or safe as the future is unsafe, and here is where ephemeral work makes sense for me. It’s not so much that “ephemeral art engages with our fear of mortality both in ourselves and in others” (89), but more that it embodies our fear of global catastrophe at an apocalyptic scale, or, if it’s not about fear for others, it is at least an acknowledgement of our collective precarity and transience.

O’Neill does speak about mourning in situations of “disenfranchised or ambiguous grief” (95). Taking from Kathleen Gilbert, she shares that there are “deaths that society does not prepare us for or provide guidelines for the appropriate mourning behavior” (95), and that:

“This lack of social recognition can increase the sense of loss, and according to Gilbert, ‘expresses itself in a variety of physical, psychological, or behavioral manifestations.’ One of these behavioral manifestations for artists who have experienced loss, especially disenfranchised loss, is an engagement with transience. At a time when the only constant in their life is transience, they seek meaning not by trying to create something permanent, but by embracing the transient and embodying it in their work.” (95-6)

Yes. This makes a lot of sense. I’m going to delve further into this topic (ephemeral art as a response to loss) in coming weeks, also looking at the value of art in general, historically and in the present. I hope that this research will give me a sense of where to take my work from here.

O’Neill, Mary. “Ephemeral Art: Mourning and Loss.” (Im)Permanence: Cultures In/Out of Time. Penn State UP, 2008.

O’Neill subsequently published her doctoral thesis on this topic.