Jieying Shao | Spoon
Information
Blowing in the Wind
Blowing in the Wind is an exploration of the relationship between people and their deceased family members and friends’ belongings. Through portraits of the clothes left behind, the project considers death and memory. The clothes are the physical connection to those who passed, their memories and their own mourning process.
The project started as a personal reflection on my own parents, myself and my wider family. However, it expanded to the wider subject of loss through the death of my best friend after I started the project. In engaging others, the work explores the subject as a collaborative therapeutic process. The work is not a statement about death but instead a record of the time spent with the collaborators marking their loss. The time spent together was a deeply personal process, and the work intends to be a poetic engagement and record of our shared time remembering lost ones. Feelings are complicated with layers of ambiguity. Amidst ideas of family, emotions, and memory, death is a sensitive matter that people tend to not talk about. There is always a very long mourning period when a loved one left us forever. The cultural barriers to open discussion about loss, grief and mourning exist. However, conversations about our attitudes toward death are healthy to ease fears and to help us live more fully.
Blowing in the Wind, as a photography project concerns about death was started last winter, one month before January 2020, which was the beginning of the unexpected year. At that moment, death is a topic with a veil. Then the pandemic starts.
As David Field, Jenny Hockey and Neil Small pointed out right at the beginning of their article Making sense of Difference, Death, gender and ethnicity in modern Britain: “Death has often been represented as the ‘great leveller’ who returns both monarch and beggar to a common dust.” (Field, Hockey and Small, 1997) Under the increasingly serious situation, it seems like the community has abdicated its ownership and control over life and death. Time witness no slowdown of the death cases but rapid growth. A heavy focus has fallen upon the topic of death. I didn’t foresee what is coming but when I look back now after 2020 has been passed, a tumult of feelings inside me fought for supremacy. The original intention was not about the pandemic, however, I become more assertive on continuing to develop this project as the fragility of human existence struck me from many different perspectives. This situation, is a revelation of “the perennial paradoxes that permeate both the future certainty of our death and the current uncertainty of our lives.” (Boltanski, Gumpert and Cowper, 1994)
I left my hometown for the first time in 2019, the long-distance between me and my parents does not alienate us but brings us new space to talk about the topics when didn’t talk about before. During one of the conversations, my mother told me there was a time when I told her how grateful I am to be her daughter, a memory occurred to her and she started to cry. “When your grandmother passes away, I didn’t cry immediately. It was not because I was not sad. It just feels like unreal and part of me just didn’t want to accept. So I was focusing on holding the funeral and sorting things out.” She seems confused,” Almost a year later, when you were telling me how grateful you are to be my daughter, I was thinking I was a daughter before and now I don’t have mum anymore and it hurts so much and I cannot stop crying.” It sounds like grief can be delayed.
The conversations about it would open up the old wounds. In the book Grief Works, Stories of Life, Death and Surviving, Julia Samuel mentions that “Death is the last great taboo; and the consequence of death, grief, is profoundly misunderstood.” (Samuel, 2018) She also suggests the importance of talking about grief for people who are going through it. Based on this understanding, I wish the conversation between me and my mother could happen earlier as obviously, she was struggling with her emotion on her own, and the talk between us and the connection we built as mother and daughter becomes an outlet for her feelings. This becomes the starting point of my project.
Annabell
Clothes kept by her husband, James “It feels like she is still here...”
James’s wife passed away because of cancer in November. When he decided to join this project, Anna has left the world for barely one month. We decided to take pictures in the apartment where they live. James was packing for moving, he said it is hard to live here alone with all the memories. It is a room full of memory: the painting she drew, the pottery she made, and the plants she kept...Memory remains in a myriad of the little details. “It feels like she is still here...” said James, who watched me taking pictures of his wife’s most frequently worn outfit. When summer came, they used to spend time in the park with friends who live nearby. “She loved bees, this outfit is her. It will remind anyone who knows Anna of her.”, he said at the overalls swaying in the breeze.
Clothes kept by her daughter, Lucy
“The coat is really warm. Actually, in such weather, it will be a perfect day to wear it. She always wore it and went to the park on a sunny winter day.”
Lucy showed me her mother’s leather jacket, which she is still wearing the coat a lot. So are her siblings. It is a black leather coat. “The coat is really warm. Actually, in such weather, it will be a perfect day to wear it. She always wore it and went to the park on a sunny winter day.” There are 6 kids in her family. So Julia used to tell them that everyone can have a date with her to make sure all of them feel the support and love. “If she were still here, we’d have gone to the park together probably, sitting next to each other just like this.”
We had conversations about their heartbreaking loss and both of them said they feel better after talking about it their grief. The ones that we love never really leave us, and you can always find them around. Here the comments Elizabeth Hallam, and Jenny Hockey made indicate that “memory objects were used to sustain connections between life and death.” (Hallam and Hockey, 2001) During the shootings, the movement of the clothes in the wind was documented as ephemeral, who hold the memories and feelings and become the connection. Hence, the name of the project is decided as Blowing in the Wind.
After his mother’s death, Roland Barthes started to keep a mourning diary, where he wrote: “There is a time when death is an event, an adventure, and as such mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes. And then one day it is no longer an event, it is another duration, compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse: true mourning not susceptible to any narrative dialectic.” (Barthes, Léger and Howard, 2010) When death came to your life, it changes the way you preserve the world.
My practice of this project has been changed as the subject of loss has sadly become more relevant through the death of my best friend right happening in January, it became personal. I met her when I was twelve and since then we became friends. We were chatting with each other every day even after I came to the UK, then she was missing and I never got her message back again. We didn’t say a proper goodbye when I left China since I always thought that our friendship won’t change because of the distance or time difference and everything will be the same when I go back to visit. But I didn’t expect that casual waving on the street was the last time I saw her. I got a message when I got out of the tube station, telling me that she was found in a river.
The grief stopped me from proceeding with the project. I was very guilty of doing this project because I was thinking it was like a butterfly effect that her left has something to do with me doing this project. That thought was so hurtful and I didn’t know if I
was able to continue doing it. I read the book called Grief Works and it says “There is often a conflict between our head and our heart; our head knows it was, for example, a terrible accident, but in our heart, we feel as if we had done something wrong.” (Samuel, 2018) That was what I was feeling. Even logically I understood it is a terrible coincidence but I still wanted to quit this project because I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
I thought, we should not talk about death.
I read Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, he lost his son and wife. He wrote under his drawing:
“Where is sad?
Sad is anywhere.
It comes along and finds you.” (Rosen and Blake, 2011)
It comes along and finds you.” (Rosen and Blake, 2011)
All the memories I had with her came back when something similar happened and it was waiting just in small details of life. Roland Barthes once said, “Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.” (Barthes, Léger, Léger and Howard, 2010) I felt sad all the time. But the words during the conversations I made with James and Lucy kept popping back to me. I remember they told me, grief is like waves, it comes and goes. But it will get better. These words supported me. I realize the moments when we were talking about death turned out helped me. That was the moment I realize why should go back to this project because what they have experienced became something I hold on to.
Clothes kept by her granddaughter, Ana
“She was a lovely and brave lady, traveled a lot. I feel sad that I was not with her when she passed away so I never had a chance
to say a proper goodbye with her.”
It was a rainy day in London. I met Ana. We decided to have a small moment together for our loved ones. So we brought roses with us to Tower Bridge. Her grandma Teresita Zertuche Elizalde Pölhs passed away when she arrived in London for months. “She was a lovely and brave lady, traveled a lot. I feel sad that I was not with her when she passed away so I never had a chance to say a proper goodbye with her.” Ana had an orange silk scarf with her, a beautiful female face was painted on it. She said it belonged to her grandma and her family sent it to her as something to remind her of Teresita. Seeing the river carries the roses away, a goodbye is said in the wind.
With my own experience, I realize that the work that engages others with people’s loss might have the potential to explore the subject as a collaborative therapeutic process. A self-portrait has been composed not only of images of myself but becomes a joint effort made by both sides. By understanding that the work is not about making a statement about death but a record of the time spent with the collaborators marking their loss, I want to develop this project into a poetic engagement and record of time spent remembering lost ones.
Blowing in the Wind, as the name indicates, ostensibly can be visually described as series of still pictures that show the clothes movement but inside it is also an exploration of the relationship between people and their deceased family members and friends’ belongings. Through portraits of the clothes left behind, the project considers death and memory. The clothes are the physical connection to those who passed away, their memories and their own mourning process. “Photography,” Barthes proclaimed, “has something to do with resurrections.” The photograph presents “reality in a past state: at once the past and the real,” (Smith, 2014) and therefore the photograph’s subject is always simultaneously present and absent. The characteristic of photography makes it the perfect medium to build the bridge between the death and the memory, the past and the real.
The clothes here in this project are not just individual objects as items but images that combine the clothes with the environment and people’s personal experience related to their grief process to create integration. As Elspeh.H. Brown and Thy Phu suggest in the introduction of the book, the exchange of the memorials help the intimate community built by the connections drawn from the death (usually families or friend groups) to keep the material trace of the memories that related to the beloved. The clothes have been transformed into those who possess the functions as memorials of those irrevocable losses. The decision to focus on the deceased person's clothes as symbols of the lost bodily form but retained spirit has personal relevance and motivation for the project. The observation and interpretation of the clothes, therefore, is lingering between the complex territory of presence and absence. Also, this choice enables the project to talk about the sensitive taboo without showing the subjects by avoiding them being exposed powerlessly against the intrusion of the camera. In response to the focus on the presence of the clothes, it offers the possibility for the project to evolve into a collaborative project as a therapeutic process of grief and mourning for both sides. Six people joined this project, with the objects they kept of those loved ones.
Clothes kept by his partner, Matthew
“Time flies, but grief still comes like waves.”
After seeing my project, Matthew reached out to me around February. His partner, Neil, had passed away in his sleep 11 months ago. We arranged to photograph Neil's clothes on the first day of March. It was one of the sunniest days in London.
Neil was a writer. His piano stool, where he used to sit and play, had been vacant for a long time, gathering a thin layer of dust. Behind the piano was a window through which sunlight streamed in, filtered by the blooming cherry blossoms. Neil's cat, seemingly sensing his presence, followed us closely, sitting by Neil's shoes. The cat, who is now five years old, was a stray that they rescued two years ago.
Matthew showed me the flowers from Neil’s funeral, saying they were a symbol of Neil’s Scottish heritage. I carefully pinned them to his scarf.
“Freudian psychoanalysis sees mourning as a process necessary for survival It enables the bereaved to grieve by ‘letting go’ of and ‘breaking the attachment’ to the lost person or object.” (Ritchie, 2003) Grief is believed to be the emotional reaction to a loss of beloved ones. The fact that we have to go through to adjust ourselves to a world without some certain important characters of our life makes us mourning. As a matter of fact, “the distance between death and life was not traditionally perceived as a ‘radical metamorphosis’... the idea of an absolute negativity, a sudden, irrevocable plunge into an abyss without memory, did not exist” (Ariès, 2008)
It is those who survive the deceased person helped his or her past life got remembered and gradually stitched into a shared past by remembering them in their way, namely, grief. (Field, Hockey and Smal, 1997)
Cloth kept by her daughter Lizzie
“Everyday I wake up, I still feel she will come back today.”
The project itself grows into a collaborative project. For me, being a storyteller and a documentary photographer in this case almost makes me a pure recorder while the collaborators are invited to make the presentation. Meanwhile, I am also portraying my vulnerabilities by mirroring theirs.
There is both good and bad aspect of involving personal experience into the project. Involving my personal experience is a critical moment for this project, from where I realize the importance of working collaboratively in a narration orientation documentary project. It comes very naturally that the project turned into a collaborative one. For me, this project becomes very different from my former attempts since it is no longer just one way for me to express my inner self. I was more a recorder in this process, facilitating people to tell their stories and go through the process with them.
That is also where this project starts to become more important for my career as an artist. I realize how important for a documentary project to tell the stories.
“The thinking approach a palpable suspicion about feeling, which for her is a problem not because of its unimportance in the construction of photographic meaning. Rather, in overdetermining meaning, insofar as we may feel too much, feeling is worrisome for Sontag because it may paralyze ethical action.” (Brown and Phu, 2014)
As it has been discussed above, however, the boundary of the feeling and the objectivity can be very blurry if there is not enough distance between the personal emotion and the project presentation, in this case, the construction of photographic meaning. Ethical and moral issues should always be treated carefully in such a sensitive case. How much space should the photographer give while telling the stories? This brings back to my original question: How we should face death, with silence or with words? Through the creation of the project, I find out there is no absolute answer for it but the question has been answered. “Grief is an intensely personal, contradictory, chaotic and unpredictable internal process.” (Samuel, 2018) Different people have different ways to cooperate with their grief. Some people prefer to remain silent on what they are going through but when they chose to talk, the conversations sometimes can help a lot.
Clothes kept by her granddaughter, Ola
“I want to name the colours you gave me green chair I drank tea on this morning blue sofa I afternooned in
yellow triangle pillows shouldering me aquamarine leftover eyeliner
flirting with my last eyelash lash
i am home, in all the colours I saw you love.”
I went to Death café to talk with people. I didn’t approach them as an artist. In fact, I didn’t even mention my project. I just find relief to talk with people and exchange thinking on this tough journey and it helped me to realize grief is a universal emotion human being shared through life. There was a time the meeting was held in a temple. I got to listen to some people who are facing their own death, from another perspective. It was supposed to be painful but their optimists towards life and braveness towards death turned out become therapeutic for me. I talked to a lady who has reached her late 80s. She said she used to be a traveler and now she realized it is almost impossible for her to travel any further, she said:” I am too old, I cannot even drag my luggage” and it is time for her to start her final trip: she is visiting all the cemetery in London to find herself the place she is going to rest forever. “I don’t want my kids to rent a fancy car for me at my funeral. I am the type of person who goes to a supermarket for reduced food, which my daughter calls second-hand food. You know, I am that kind of person, so I think my last journey should be by bus, it fits me.” A monk who is volunteering at the temple joined the talk, she just arrived in London but got diagnosed with cancer and the doctor said it will be soon. She said the death has been a clock running in her mind for a year and it becomes an everyday life counting down things. “You get used to it.” She said. They make jokes out of it: “Don’t buy green banana... because you don’t know if you can eat it before you go.”
Hand-made Books as Gifts for the Collaborators
Hand-made Books A6 size(105mmX148mm) in a slide box Books review videos 08:51.0
The idea of the handmade books as a final presentation also comes from offering them a physical existence as a memorial. The size has been decided as A6, being capable to be hold in hand, which enables it as a gift while also becomes a way to engage the readers. In this way, the images have become objects, serving as something that the audience can hold and circulate. The traffic between photography and objects forges distinctive conjunction between the ephemeral and material.
Video Frozen in the Ice
Black & White silent videos 04:40.0
A 4 minutes Black & White silent video has been made, recording the process of ice melting. There are printed photographs inside of the ice. “As an archival object, the photograph’s power derives as much from its affective magic as from its realist claims, and ultimately from the powerful combination of the two.” (Cvetkovich, 2014) In a sense, this video tries to draw the connection between my interpretation and the conversations that happened. The idea comes from their description of grief by transforming the invisible emotions into physical objects, using the photograph’s dual status as both material object and document of the ephemeral. The video has been reversed so it looks like the prints have been frozen. It intends to indicate the process of people’s grief as a universal experience shares the same characteristics as how ice works. Grief can be as tough as ice hurting us but it will also melt into our daily memories and always be with us. It took an average of 4 hours for each ice to melt so the video has been sped up.
This project is an ongoing endeavor, and if you resonate with its essence and have a personal story to contribute, I extend a heartfelt invitation. Please feel to get in touch. Together, let's embark on a transformative journey of remembrance and healing, infusing life into the cherished memories that softly whisper in the wind.