Grief is more than just an emotion. It’s a lens through which we see the world.
This is the driving idea behind as the wind blew: the ground beneath me / at the water’s edge / in its path, the latest exhibit on display at the Martha Street Studio in the Exchange District.
“It is a very long title,” admits artist Martha Crawley, though it does the job of covering the three bodies of work that the exhibit contains.
Comprising of pinhole photographic images made with cameras constructed by Crawley and lumen printing, the exhibit was created in response to an episode of grief. “These works were made as my response to my personal loss that I felt and the grief that I felt when my mom passed away.”
“I actually started doing the work that ended up in the gallery here prior to my mom passing, the initial impulse was responding to how vulnerable and fragile she was becoming,” Crawley elaborates. “I wanted to start kind of exploring what it meant to become vulnerable.”
That exploration involved Crawley laying on the ground of the forest and setting up one of her pinhole cameras, which require long periods of time to capture an image. It soon became something of a ritual for her, with multiple elements to the process that helped her tap into a sense of vulnerability.
“With alternative photography and pinhole photography... you don’t know whether there’s anything happening,” Crawley explains. “So, I just did this, went through this process many times, not knowing whether anything would appear on the film in the cameras. But I realized in that process that it didn’t really matter. What was important was what I was doing, that kind of ritual of laying down and slowing down and taking time and thinking.”
The forest is not the only place where Crawley performed her photographic ritual. A video playing on a loop in the gallery shows Crawley in a bathing suit, wrapped in plastic, lying in the sand on the shores of Clear Lake while pinhole cameras capture her immersed in the earth yet again.
“It really reminded me how whenever I’m stressed, I go to the water,” Crawley shares. “Swimming is my thing. My mom and I used to swim all the time. I started to really recognize... everything that water had given me and that being at that shoreline really helped me process the grief that I was feeling with my mom.”
That processing of grief is reflected in the lumen prints hanging on the north wall of the exhibit, which provide a stark, vibrant colour contrast to the monochrome images captured by the pinhole cameras.
The lumen printing process, which involves capturing UV light on photo paper with objects placed on them to create interesting designs. was something that Crawley had never attempted before. “I just fell in love with the process and the colours that you can get,” says Crawley who loves the intuitive nature of the medium. "I simply went to the shoreline and used what was there – sand, stones, leaves, seeds, plants and the water itself.”
“Being at the shoreline and working in that way with the nature was a way to kind of honour my mom, and work through and still continue to process and be in that place with the water.”
Crawley believes that even though grief is a hard lens to explore life through, she thinks that gallery goers will appreciate the experience. “Everybody experiences grief in some way, so I think as an artist, you know, when you’re working with a subject as large as that, lots of people are going to find a way in, you know, to the work.”
as the wind blew: the ground beneath me / at the water’s edge / in its path is on display at the Martha Street Studio until April 17. The gallery is open 10 a.m. through 5 p.m. from Tuesday through Saturday. More information can be found at the Martha Street Studio website.