Grief as Badousian ‘Event’, or ‘My Year of Magical Painting’ with Lucy Wright

The event of Lucy’s father’s unexpected death in 2021 was profoundly shocking, and in the year that followed she felt as if nothing was, or should be, the same—including her practice. Previously asocially-engaged artist, she began making paintings for the first time, creating private, material rituals to feel some sense of control over the lonely and changed world that she had entered.

For her Artist-Led Session, Lucy invited the Throes participants to explore the ways in which grief is an ‘Event’ in the (capitalized) Badiousian sense, which describes an experience that is difficult or impossible to make sense of using dominant terms. For Alain Badiou—and Slavoj Zizek following him—Events are ‘rupture[s] in the normal run of things’ (Žižek 2014, 38) offering ‘a glimpse ...beyond a reality reducible to already-constructed discourses’ (Robinson 2015). After an Event, a new language must be created to describe the future situation that the revealing of new truths has realized (Badiou 2011).

During the session we will spent an initial period of time engaged in a silent painting practice, using watercolour on seed-paper, with an emphasis on repetitive brush strokes and materials-led enquiry. The aim was not to paint anything in particular, but rather to explore painting as a mode of grieving.

Images above of repetitive painting experiments produced by the Throes of Grief participants present during Lucy’s session.