UNANSWERED AND UNANSWERABLE

Something that I have really been struggling this week particularly, is having ‘unanswerable questions’. This has really sent me into a weird place mentally and has been a really barrier I have had to cross or am trying to cross.

This project has been really emotionally draining and painful With each new thing I try to learn about myself or figure out, it brings on a whole new load of questions I have in my mind that I want to ask my parents. Obviously with not being able to do this, it brings on this whole other side to the emotional journey of discovering my cultural identity and thats the journey of grief and bereavement I guess.

I think this notion of having these unanswerable questions is something I would like to think about portraying through my work for this project as it is such a big part of my journey of cultural identity. I think I didn’t necessarily want to think of it as a barrier before because it was hard to come to terms with, but I do think it has played the biggest role in terms of how long its taken me to get to the place I am now with trying to learn more about my heritage.

In fact, Steph told me about a project by Chris Brooks who didn’t have any living family and so set out to the town he was born in, to find out more about his family history, and over the course of 10 years, he basically found out nothing and compiled a book of images and work that displayed the journey and process instead of emptiness, loss and then acceptance by compiling them together. https://thebrookspress.com/home