Ten Stages of Grief

Exhibited at Impermanence, Rookery Artists Collective, Brompton Cemetery Chapel, 2019.

Images currently on Instagram @eclaircallow (autumn 2019). Or please check back here soon.

This series is inspired by the Neo-classical architecture of Brompton cemetery, where stylised acanthus decorate the capitals of its Corinthian columns. These leaves are a traditional emblem for mourning, as they originally grew in Greek and Roman graveyards.

More recently, the psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler Ross theorised a set of emotions for the grief process. While an individual’s experience is not linear or predictable, having a summary outline can be reassuring, both in containing and acknowledging its transitory nature.

This work fuses my own understanding of the key stages, with an instructional diagram for drawing the increasingly elaborate leaf (originally by wood carver, Mary May). The two ideas are brought together by the use of a symbolic and celebratory colour palette, painted in a heraldic style.