05.2017/065.

Summer 065

London : Hilary Dalke, 2017.

1 print : black monotype print on tissue paper ; 58 x 50 cm

"They were prints made of leaves from a Paulownia tree in our own home garden; it was a tree that meant a lot to my husband and me. The printing of the leaves formed a diary and record of our final journey together, during that very difficult time of his terminal illness with cancer. Beginning in the autumn of 2016 when he became very ill I decided to make nature prints on a daily basis. I committed to doing the prints of the leaves following the seasons and tracing their passage through decay to renewal throughout the year. At the time I did not realise the impact this work would have on me. They commenced with a massive drop of leaves, in the Fall, as they fell on me in our garden during the final stages of his illness. I showed my husband the first of the Fall prints after he asked me what I was doing every morning. He knew immediately what they were about. He loved them and sensed the importance of them to both of us. The works explored my response of deep anguish to his transition into death. Recognising the ghost of the leaf in the ink of the print captured a compelling moment in time that could never be relived. Wraith is the Scottish dialectal word for ghost, spirit, spectre, spirit, phantom, apparition, manifestation, vision, shadow, presence, poltergeist, supernatural and ghostlike image of someone - before or after death. The word grew to be a powerful link to what was happening, irrevocable yet celebratory, through to an acceptance of life renewing irrespectively. It was no surprise that as an artist, I would find it necessary to make some private works during this time. Events certainly transfigured by creative energy of the emotions, were driven into sincere spontaneous works, that felt like natural outlets for me. As an artist, I have continually marked important times with intense creative periods - consoling, private, and reactive. The visual diary was very private, not intended for anyone to see, and evolved into a powerful record of that time spent every morning printing as I saved, and salvaged leaves sandwiched between sheets of the previous day's daily newspaper and printed before my husband woke. The images became direct, hard expressions of the awful and inevitable; on reviewing, much later on, the works became not a secret, but a powerful voice of emotional energy existing and encapsulating the time after his passing away. These pieces dealt with my journey of an important and painful time caring for my husband. The work ran close, concurrently with his illness and became a profound and deep passage of a year with him then through his passing away, to a life inevitably faced without him. The leaves fell and degraded and broke down as death occurred and life closed; but a neoteric life force prevailed which I found surprising through looking at the work after his passing. One print always jumps into my mind when I think of the series; it sums up the state of life as it ebbed away, and the totally abject state I found myself in, that aligned with that terrible passage of time."--Hilary Dalke, 2019.

Signed in pencil in bottom right corner: HD.

Title provided by the artist.

Wellcome Collection 3321171i

Creative Commons Attribution - Non-Commercial CC-BY-NC