I wanted an installation to exist as a catharsis after Trevor's death. This would fit in with the way I need to engage my whole body and spirit with materials in order to feel that he is still part of this process. It needed to become a repository for my pain.
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​It was like instilling myself into a stone - a lithic fragment - by meditatively hitting stoneware clay with a rusted chain. It may not let me in, but I was metaphorically hammering and knocking while the stone was in its nascent clay state.

Conversation with a Stone,
By Wislawa Szymborska

I knock at the stone’s front door
“It’s only me, let me come in.
I want to enter your insides,
have a look around,
breathe my fill of you.”

Go away,” says the stone.
“I’m shut tight.
Even if you break me to pieces,
we’ll all still be closed.
You can grind us to sand,
we still won’t let you in.”
​
I knock at the stone’s front door.
“It’s only me, let me come in.
I’ve come out of pure curiosity.
Only life can quench it.
I mean to stroll through your palace,
then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water.
I don’t have much time.
​My mortality should touch you.”

“I’m made of stone,” says the stone.
“And must therefore keep a straight face.
Go away.
I don’t have the muscles to laugh.”

I knock at the stone’s front door.
“It’s only me, let me come in.
I hear you have great empty halls inside you,
unseen, their beauty in vain,
soundless, not echoing anyone’s steps.
Admit you don’t know them well yourself.

Trevor and I were discussing before he died how he really believed that his body and his consciousness were part of the whole. I think Jung called it the collective unconscious. The Buddhist Middle Way was also a way that he found comfortable in terms of death. 
And then - soon afterwards  - he was dead.

Buddhists believe that there is no permanent self or soul. Because there is no unchanging permanent essence or soul, Buddhists sometimes talk about energy being reborn, rather than souls. (Anatta) 
Certainly the body is never permanent, even in life. Every cell in the body is replaced on a consistent basis.
LINK: Brain cells: 200+ years? Eye lens cells: Lifetime; Egg cells: 50 years; Heart muscle cells: 40 years; Intestinal cells (excluding lining): 15.9 years; Skeletal muscle cells: 15.1 years; Fat cells: 8 years; Hematopoietic stem cells: 5 years; Liver cells: 10-16 months; Pancreas cells: 1 year; Thank heavens liver cells are rapidly replaced!

​Working with clay feels very connected for me. It is as if I push and scratch at the clay to tell it how I feel and then the clay reacts...it seems to push back and record my pain.
I seem to be making these very similar 'stones' every day. But each one seems different as my pain changes from day to day. I will keep them and then work with them again to find out if anything has changed.

Reading Entangled Lives by Merlin Sheldrake (Kindle) after Trevor’s death, really opened my eyes to the way the organisms of the world are related. I think mycelia can be a metaphor for this entanglement. Timothy Morton also writes about this in the Mesh. “At the  DNA level, the whole biosphere is highly permeable and boundaryless”. (Morton: 27) It is comforting to think that this commonality persits through time and in all places on this thin skin of the Earth that we inhabit. (Latour…Down to Earth)

I've got hold of some oyster mushroom spawn and am growing it in straw outside. I hope to add it to my installation as it is another aspect of the world that includes Trevor. I would really like to have the mycelia established in our garden as well. the installation could move back here after the exhibition.

While I'm waiting for mycelia to grow and clay to dry, I have started making a large fabric 'object' from tubular cotton gauze. The off-white colour reminds me of the mycelia and so I have worked strange tendrils and roots from the main body. I could stuff it with straw as well. Maybe the mycelia will grow in it? I find it very relaxing and peaceful in the afternoons when my back is sore and I need to lie down.

There is obviously no pattern and I am just spontaneously adding and inventing bumps and distortions as I go along...completely intuitively. Filling it with holes and irregularities; loops and twists.  Perhaps I could stain it with chemicals and weave wire into it once its hanging in the exhibition venue.