Emily A. Pastor

“In Grief” is a series created to honor the sacred places of loss, trauma, and grief in our lives. As a primarily representational painter, I felt that abstraction was the needed deviation for this sensitive project. In these pieces the black ink seems to take on a life of its own as it spreads and stains the paper. This process reminded me of grieving. We are uncomfortable by the unruliness of our grief. We would like grief to follow rules and reduce its flow and spread. But grief is not like that, it’s complicated, and does not follow a neat linear path.

The 24k gold in these pieces represents the Holy Spirit communing with us in our losses. The Holy Spirit does not diminish, cover up, or rush our grief, but like the Japanese art of Kintsugi, redeems that which we believed was hopelessly broken. Depending on the light, this gold looks dim or it is brilliant, reminding me of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our grief: sometimes hidden and sometimes profoundly obvious.