Healing Hearts Accordion Book

I have long been drawn to books. Since childhood they have represented a fantastic escape, a way for me to revise the parts of my life I chose to bury or repress. Books, like any art, function as a sort of container. In the art studio, witnessing clients as they descended into the transformative depths of grief, it was my responsibility to create a therapeutic container to hold their stories. Story by story, memory by memory, dream by dream, clients bravely gave themselves over to grief. I started journaling and creating altered books as a form of self-care during my internship, creating the same therapeutic container for myself that I sought to offer my clients in the art studio. But as I sat to write this statement I realized that I was not taking the next step. I was making this art and writing it off as self-care so I wouldn't be forced to engage in the same shadow-work I beheld my clients bravely doing on a daily basis.

The last piece I created was an accordion book of illustrations depicting a young girl repairing and creating her heart. Repair or creation entails that her heart was somehow broken, lost, or missing. My clients suffered from similar heartache, a fruitless yearning to fill a void with something or someone they could no longer physically grasp. This void never goes away, but it does change shape. Sitting in the ambiguous between-space of grief, unsure of everything they held such faith in, clients started to rebuild their hearts. At times the profound resiliency of my clients would leave me breathless. As I made these pieces my breath returned; I was grounded by creating something in the midst of so much loss. But until now I didn’t understand that within every act of creation there also lies loss. With even the happiest of transitions there is mourning for moving past what once was. I cannot definitively offer you the meaning of these pieces because I am still sitting with not knowing, ambiguity, and fear. What my clients have taught me is that it is okay to take my time in this space, for it is a space filled with potential - a space of rest, restoration, and reclamation.

^ This is my favorite :)