Marianne
Marianne is a visual artist and facilitator.
Her mum Karan died in 2012.
“I took the kids to London to see the Natural History Museum. I fell in love with the gemstones and minerals collection.
When I went home, I started thinking about what I could use to grow crystals onto. And in the corner of my studio was my mum’s make-up bag.
Mum was the eldest of four kids. She was from an Irish family. As a pub landlady, she could command a room of drunken men with a single shout. She had this fierce way about her.
And she always had her face on. She did Avon. She had a collection of 42 lipsticks.
They’re all contoured in the way that she wore them. Her DNA is on those lipsticks. I say that they’re a ‘personally sculpted epitaph of extreme detail’.
When I saw the way the crystals grew, it was like seeing her afterlife. She lived on - she grew on - through these lipsticks.
For two years, I photographed lipsticks non-stop. I started off in black and white. For me, that represented how grief starts out. That black world you live in.
I wanted to achieve object permanence. That’s what the photographs were about: trying to create something tangible. She wasn’t here, but the photographs were something I could grab onto.
I was making photograms - placing the lipsticks onto a piece of colour photo paper, exposing them, developing them. Auras of lipsticks, glowing in the darkness.
You have to make them in the pitch black, which again represented my grief. There are so many layers to these images.
I cast the lipsticks, I carved them, I sculpted them in resin and ice. I carved one out of plaster and put a golden sash round it - that represented my mother as a landlady, as a matriarch. The show that she had to put on.
“this project was all about me spending time with my mother”
I wrote about them in a piece called Ode to Mother. “With those lips she talked to me, shouted at me, laughed at me and laughed with me…now all that’s left are the memories and the lipsticks.”
When she died, I was four months pregnant with my first son. I didn’t grieve too much at the time. I couldn’t. All my energy went into him.
Later, I worried I’d done grieving ‘wrong’. But years on, this project was all about me spending time with my mother, being with those objects, reliving those memories.
And really sitting with my grief - walking with it, talking with it, being with it.
When I clicked that’s what I was doing - that I was spending time with my mum - I started incorporating old family photographs. That’s when I brought colour into the work, too. I was coming out the other side, out of that dark room.
I’ve learnt you can’t walk away from grief. But you can sit with it and talk with it and walk with it.
You can hold its hand instead of being in this really dark moment.
I’m still exploring objects and ephemera. I don’t think the work is done. Maybe that’s me not wanting to let go. Maybe I don’t want it to be over.
I did a residency recently down in Margate. I took a jar of her ashes and made some work with them.
I made cyanotypes in a little concertina book. You coat the papers, put some objects on top, expose them to the sunshine, take the objects off and wash the papers in water. I used my mum’s ashes as my objects.
The pictures look like little nebulas. Little worlds of Karan.
What I’ve gained - I can’t say gained - what I’ve experienced out of my mum’s death is an understanding of death, dying and bereavement.
And I’ve created something I can show other people that can potentially help them talk about their own experiences.
I think that’s my mother’s gift to me. ”