Heartbreakingly, it seems that grief and trauma are going to be experiences that unite more of us than they divide... so, though I don’t usually share works in progress, here’s some things I began working on last year.
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Shortly after my Mum died I found a grief counselor in Brooklyn and we began a process called EMDR.
This is a modality that accesses the left and right brain alternately whilst you think of an overwhelming, stuck memory until the brain is able to move and matabolize it.
After some weeks, and us only having just scratched the surface, she said she felt intuitively that I might have other traumas that needed addressing and asked me to speak about my experience with men and violence.
I shared a few things that I won’t go into here. She decided to park the grief work for a bit so that we could work through those memories.
It’s a long fucking road. My summer involved me having to create a “trauma map” for her to work off, which I did whilst finishing the ceramic works for my last solo show.
The series I’m currently working on is an expansion of my last show and I’m calling it Show Me Your Bruises Then!, but I’m not finding this time to be furtile ground for creativity so don’t know when I’ll return to my practice... and I’m learning how to surrendour to that too.
I’ve found EMDR effective, tangible, and fascinating. I wish everyone who needed it had access to it 🖤
Ink, thread, vintage textiles.
#showMeYourBruisesThen #emdr #zoebuckman ...