About

 

How does grief remain suspended?

​

Lacrimal Architecture investigates the invisible forces through which grief is sustained. Rather than representing loss as an emotional state, the installation asks whether mourning can be understood as a physical architecture: a system of tensions, balances and connections through which weight is continually redistributed rather than resolved.

​

A minimal mechanical structure of cords, pulleys and suspended masses occupies the space. Threads emerge from swollen eyes before extending upward through a network of pulleys. Some connect one mask to another; others converge toward a suspended black sphere that appears to organize the entire composition. The mechanism is entirely visible. Nothing is hidden. Yet what it reveals is not the operation of a machine, but the presence of forces that usually remain imperceptible.

​

The simplicity of the system is essential. A pulley does not eliminate weight; it changes the way it is carried. The installation follows the same principle. It does not seek to erase grief or reduce its intensity. Instead, it proposes another way of understanding it: not as a burden contained within an individual, but as a force that is constantly displaced, shared and rebalanced.

Each thread carries a different tension. Some are stretched to their limit, others remain almost slack. As they pass through the pulleys, these differences are neither corrected nor equalized. They are redistributed into a fragile equilibrium in which every element depends upon the others. The work suggests that mourning is not a fixed state but a continuous negotiation between weight, resistance and support.

​

The suspended spheres deliberately resist the logic of measurable physics. Their apparent mass never fully corresponds to the tension that sustains them. Emotional weight cannot be quantified. It accumulates, disperses, returns unexpectedly and settles elsewhere. Rather than following a linear progression, grief unfolds through successive moments of imbalance and temporary stability.

Here, tears cease to be marks left upon a face. They become lines of force that traverse space, connecting bodies through tension rather than proximity. The installation imagines an architecture built not from walls or columns, but from invisible relationships made temporarily visible.

​

Lacrimal Architecture does not represent grief. It proposes a way of thinking about how grief endures: not as something that disappears with time, but as a force that continually finds new forms of balance.

​​

The project is part of Bake Your Pain, an ongoing body of work I began three years ago following the death of my father. Through bread masks sculpted from my own face each time I cry, the project seeks to give form to grief—not as an image of loss, but as a physical language carried by the body.

​​

​​

​​

​​

​

​

Exhibition