healthy loss
healthy loss - A body of work developed during my Honours year at VCA. Assemblage and photographs. Exhibited at CASPA gallery in Castlemaine (2019) and Grad Show at VCA (2018).
there’s a healthy loss over there, the dreaded technique was found in shattered realms of my lash
one consumes the eyes
the other nourishes.
It has been said that the physical struggle between holding on and letting go characterises the activity of mourning. It is not necessarily the loss of something physical that punctures my soul; the nature of the struggle is far more ephemeral. Imagine mourning the loss of something you never actually had (perhaps you already have)… the feeling is like some sort of jovial melancholy clutching at your loins. Knowing very well that life gifts us with impermanence and decay, I observe the irony of my inquiry into the realm of where such feelings of loss might originate. Through the appropriation of discarded objects and photographs, the notion of constructing loss animates much of my current practice. In this space of play, the imagined loss manifests between the objects and my surrogate body, vicariously giving form to emotional content.
1. Photo Documentation of ‘healthy loss’, found objects (children's play equipment suspended by butchers hook, polystyrene box balanced on concrete semi-circles, shell vase atop marble circles, trolley carcass swaddled in baby material and propped with rusty garden forks, Van Gough print (scratched)) assembled and hand printed chromogenic photographs. CASPA Gallery, Castlemaine, 2019.
2. Photo Documentation of ‘healthy loss’ exhibited at the Victorian College of the Arts, the Stables, 2018.
© Lucy Foster. Living and working between Naarm (Melbourne) and Dja Dja Wurrung Country (Castlemaine) on unceded land belonging to the Wurundjeri and Jaara Jaara people of the Kulin Nation.