Expressing Grief
Group Exhibition
Ann and Meg Gorman
Ann Gorman utilizes Contemplative Photography to notice wonderful details in common places. This mindful photography practice trains the photographer to re-learn how to see the world. She uses her photography to inspire works in other mediums and hopes her art inspires others to see the beauty in the world and the importance of preserving it. She incorporates all of her senses to harness her creativity during her photo shoots and has started writing poetry inspired from the scene.
Meg Gorman’s work is a personal exploration of the natural world tinged by her memory. After taking a print making sabbatical in 2023, Meg has developed her skills across a variety of printing techniques. Working in screen printing and relief, she explores how digital and analogue processes come together through printing. Drawing inspiration from the natural world, the artist personalizes the observations, incorporating and exploring memories.
Peek-a-Bee by Ann Gorman
During this collaboration, the sisters created artwork in memory of their father, The Beeman, who lost his battle with bile duct cancer (a rare and aggressive cancer with no cure) in January 2022. From Bemidji, MN and London, they collaborated and shared their feelings as they chose what to create. Meg utilized Ann’s photography for inspiration while Ann processed her images to mimic Meg’s printmaking. Intended to be displayed together, they represent a shared experience of grief by sisters who live on different sides of a big pond (but still find ways of being close).
The photographs that they chose were of what was to become their father’s last beehives at their childhood home in Indiana taken in November 2021. Ann drove from Minnesota and arrived home dazed, but ready to help their parents navigate through treatment plans and home hospice care. There were multiple trips home over a few (short, but long) months. In moments of solitude, Ann’s mind would race and her anxiety (and sadness) would start to consume her. Photography helped Ann refocus, be present, and find strength throughout his sickness and provided a way to process his death.
Always So Proud of His Girls by Meg Gorman
During this collaboration, Meg used the medium of screen printing to process her feelings of loss, anxiety and grief which were shaped by the pandemic and the limitations it placed on her ability to travel and be with her family. While Meg did manage to travel some, trips were limited by the evolving system of rules in the US and the UK limiting movement. Much of her experience of their dad’s illness was via video calls. Using Ann’s photographs as inspiration, the prints are a direct analogy of how much of Meg’s experiences were derived from the experiences of others. The collaboration has facilitated her ability to communicate about this experience and helped her process her grief.
Their mother, Janet Gorman, plans to continue keeping the bees, allowing the collaboration to continue as it looks towards the future. This creative collaboration will assist the sisters towards a transformational renewal to move forward in life and be a seed for their new business, Adelpha Studio.
About the Artists
Ann Gorman is a self-directed Visual Artist residing in Bemidji, Minnesota. She grew up in Northwest Indiana on a quiet cul-de-sac surrounded by nature. She attended college in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she was formally trained as a pharmacist and later earned a Master of Public Health. She enjoyed her career as a clinical pharmacist and infection control officer with the Indian Health Services at sites in New Mexico, Arizona, and Minnesota. Her path taught her the importance of community, the need to embrace the cultures around us, and highlighted the connection between the environment and our health. She loves being outdoors, traveling to new places and teaching yoga.
Meg Gorman (USA/UK) is an illustrator, painter, printer and general mess-maker pursuing a portfolio career. She is also a writer, arts charity trustee and business transformation specialist with over 25 years of corporate experience in four countries. A self-directed artist, she completed non-degreed creative classes and workshops in San Francisco, New York, Cornwall, Wales and London. She currently is based at the Art Hub Studios in London. She has also written, illustrated and self-published a children’s picture book and has been exhibiting her work in the UK for a year.
Molly Mae
Molly Mae is a creator, generalist, and lifelong curious soul. Constantly weaving in themes of grief, discovery, community, decay, and home in her life and work. Grounded in Brainerd, MN, she translates these themes with her hands by painting, writing, and fermenting, to name just a few.
Still Here by Molly Mae
She believes that experiences and emotions are meant to be stewarded, and she uses her creative practices to translate that. She is drawn to the human form and the natural world, but most of her work revolves around color and how it interacts with the rest of the piece along with the viewer.
Even though her work is primarily in acrylic, it is severely tactile in practice, from hand stretching canvases to incorporating clay to add a 3D component. Inviting the viewer to have a sensory experience even as they keep their hands to themselves: textured backgrounds, molded frames, installs that allow proximity.
Painting concepts begins while in motion, on a walk, washing dishes, or hands in the garden. Eventually forming into sketches, underpaintings, then final products, but attention is not her strong suit, with as many as 5-10 pieces in progress at a time.
Beginning as an apprentice in fine art at age seven, has molded Molly Mae into the multimedia artist she is today, and many aspects of life inspire the direction of her art. Most recently, grief has haunted every corner and, intentionally or unintentionally, led the direction of her creativity, through color, form, and the nuances that breathes through art.
Creating is the thing she loves and hates the most but is the medium in which she understands; what it means to be woven in this discipline, community, and earth.
Susan Sveda-Pachaud
I am telling love stories, through my art.
A Reclaimed Soul by Susan Sveda-Pachaud
My love stories are fragile, as often as they are brutal. My love stories are filled with tenderness, sadness, desire and regret. Amidst an endless cycle of going to work, coming home, domestic tasks, personal interactions, and caretaking responsibilities, I find tiny and fleeting clues about the nature of love all around me. I feel that life and love are both profoundly touching and horribly cruel. My stories build from lived, observed or vicariously experienced exchanges and encounters. Occasionally, a piece of literature or music will resonate strongly within me and will be used as impetus for art also. Building a love story through art creates a bridge toward understanding the ways in which people interact and form, build or break relationships. These interactions are beautiful, mysterious, and heartbreaking and are reflected through my art.
The manner of creation and materials that I use to tell my love stories are of the same varied nature as how or where I get my ideas. I work in 2D and 3D mixed media, depending upon what my idea needs to visually tell its story. The art will sometimes expand into installation as well. Lately, I work in thematic collections, creating entire bodies of new work for each story I wish to tell. I select a different scale, technique, and material for each work. I use these tools to help steer the emotional content of a piece. My favorite materials are those that carry a pre-existing weight of content (found objects, domestic or household materials and debris, and items found in thrift stores). Aside from those favorites, I will employ anything I need to, to tell a strong visual story. I often use stereotypical women’s work or craft techniques to situate my story in the female point of view, or at least in traditional notions of the feminine experience. Repetition, as expressed in multiples, or in very labor-intensive processes factor in, from the technique side, to speak to everyday life. I use this wide variety of materials and techniques to help create richer undercurrents of meaning in my love stories.
As in love and as in my art, anything goes.
Eric Twait
I started telling people I wanted to be an artist when I was four. For the past twenty-five years I spent as much time as I could traveling and drawing and painting pictures of landscapes. I always had a “real” job to go along with the art and never really explored selling art very much.
Letters to the Void: Maria, by Eric Twait
About two years ago, my wife was diagnosed with cancer. It was terminal. Suddenly I had no time for art. I tried to spend every moment I could with her, and my studio grew dusty, and my paints dried out. If I tried to do some art, the place where it comes from was in a drought.
I found myself acting as a caretaker for her. We did go on some fun trips, but mostly we found ourselves in Rochester. I started looking at artwork wherever I could, local galleries and hotels. The Mayo Clinic has an extensive collection, and I started giving impromptu tours to family and friends to entertain them when Maria was at a procedure or an appointment.
In December I told Maria that I wanted to take a year off after she passed to work on artwork and to heal. She thought that was a great idea.
Maria passed away on Christmas Eve 2023. When things calmed down, I found myself at the easel fully expecting to work on a landscape. Instead, these came out. I call them “Letters to the Void.”