Among flowers and bones - Megan Hamilton

I carry you with me, I carry you all. I search for the glimpses of the other side, the spaces you now inhabit. My art is opening up and creating portals. Portals to the other side, the spirit realm, the unknown. Portals to the past and future. A passageway between here and elsewhere.

A journey with grief, among flowers and bones explores subjects of death, memory and afterlife, based upon personal complicated grief and trauma stemming from mental illness and the ongoing opioid crisis. Pondering questions of what does it mean to ‘be in-between’ I examine the relationships between grief and liminal spaces. Using an array of analogue and digital techniques such as collage, image transfer, 16mm film, and polaroids I create dreamscapes that explore both presence and absence, preservation and decay, loss and longing. Fusing images and found objects I conjure altars, creating space to embody one’s grief. Death guides my research from the Cemetery, and the liminal, to Hauntology, Spiritualism and death rituals. Through questioning our relationships to objects, to understanding how trauma effects our memory and bodies, I search for a way to live amongst the heaviness. Infusing my emotion in the processes of making through cathartic and repetitive mutations, with the belief that the act of creating is transformative and healing, I am finding ways to honour both the death and life, that surrounds us.