16 Haiti

Haiti, a fragment of grief 2010
Bronze h8 x w16 x d13 cm

The fragment of grief appeared sort of by accident when I put an unfinished, terracotta head out into the rain to see what would happen.  I was at home trying to model a head in clay, just to see if I could do it, and was getting frustrated.  So out it went into the garden, where I wouldn’t have to see it.  Predictably, the clay head fell to bits but this one piece, a fragment, survived the experiment and caught my eye.

It was around the time when Haiti was hit by a huge magnitude 7 earthquake in 2010.  I remember feeling very distressed at the intrusive press coverage.  The pain, fear and grief of the Haitian people was hard to view on the television screen.  The devastation was terrible: death, injury, lost families, shattered homes, nowhere safe to shelter.  I couldn’t watch and turned the news off, it had become too much.

Grief is a difficult emotion to witness.  The fallen fragment of modelled clay which had been created in my rainy garden, was taken through the lost wax process.  All I added was a teardrop onto the wax version before it was transformed into bronze.  Maybe if grief can be viewed as a fragment, rather than the whole picture, it can just about be coped with?