The Traveling Grief

Description

Artist Notes

What is grief? That was the question that haunted me for some time. After my father passed away in 2019, I wrote an article mourning him titled “Beyond Habeas Viscus: Mourning my Father.” My father died just hours after I landed in Beirut, and I began writing the piece while traveling to a conference a few weeks later. The weight of mourning and grief was pervasive. For years, I carried “grief” as an abstract image; a mixture of sadness, darkness, depression, tears, silence, chaos, and heaviness. When I chose to paint that feeling, I had only one option, drawing on what I had read about grief and loss after my mother was killed. It felt like a heavy burden, almost kneeling me to the ground. As Gazans say, “It breaks my back.” This artwork became a representation of strong emotions arriving all at once a collage of boarding passes that symbolize how grief travels with us.

Preservation Notes

MATERIALS AND CONSTRUCTION The Traveling Grief is a physical mixed-media painting with collage, not a digital-native work. The medium is recorded as acrylics, carbons and mixed media on canvas with tickets and border passes; the materials record specifies a linen canvas support, border passes, airline tickets and train tickets adhered with polymer-based adhesives. Recorded dimensions are 65 x 54 cm, making this one of the largest works in the collection. Construction confirmed from the medium-resolution scan (2026-09-10): a stretched linen canvas, apparently on wooden stretcher bars, raw or gesso-primed. The collaged tickets cover approximately 25 to 30% of the surface and sit UNDER the acrylic, with heavy black and grey brushwork overlapping and obscuring much of the printed text. Ticket clusters are concentrated in the upper right quadrant, along the right margin, at the upper left corner, and as scattered fragments through the lower left and centre. One boarding pass is legible as Turkish Airlines, marked GROUP B 13A, with routing that appears to read Gothenburg and Istanbul. Paint application is heavy: black gestural strokes at roughly 3 to 5 mm impasto concentrated in the centre, grey secondary strokes at 2 to 3 mm over them, and dry-brush scumbling through the centre and lower areas. Fine charcoal or carbon linear marks overlay the central black passage and appear at upper centre and lower areas, confirming that the "Carbons" entry in the medium field is real and not a cataloguing error. DISCREPANCY: The catalogue description places a red figure at the LEFT corner. The scan shows the saturated red passage in the UPPER RIGHT quadrant, applied with heavy impasto over both collaged tickets and the ground, with fine black linear marks over it. Either the description is wrong or it refers to an element not visible in this scan. This should be resolved against the physical work. CONDITION (assessed 2026-09-10 from the medium-resolution scan; requires physical confirmation) The archivist's earlier assessment recorded this work as being in "impeccable condition." That assessment is NOT supported by examination of the scan and should be treated as superseded. The painted structure is sound, but the collage layer and the carbon media both show active problems. COLLAGE LAYER, the primary concern: - Moderate corner lift at overlapping ticket edges, most pronounced where the Turkish Airlines pass meets adjacent documents in the upper right. - Pronounced edge lift and curling on the right-margin tickets. - Multiple horizontal and vertical creases across all ticket elements. - Several small tears of roughly 2 to 4 mm at ticket edges, at points where paint application created stress. - Surface abrasion on ticket faces where heavy brush pressure was applied over them. - Moderate yellowing overall, more pronounced on the cream and beige passes. - Scattered brown foxing on the upper left blue ticket and on centre fragments, indicating historical moisture exposure. - Thermal-printed text is fading at the edges. This is characteristic of airline boarding passes and is IRREVERSIBLE; thermal print fades to blank with time, heat, and light. Once gone, the routing and date information that gives these tickets their documentary meaning is unrecoverable. CARBON AND CHARCOAL MEDIA: - Moderately friable and inconsistently fixed. Marks covered by overlying acrylic are stabilised; exposed fine lines, particularly toward the composition edges, are susceptible to smudging under minimal contact pressure and to smearing if exposed to moisture. - No comprehensive fixative is present. PAINT LAYER, largely stable: - Minimal crazing; acrylic binder integrity appears sound. - No cupping. No active flaking or loose debris. - Minor edge-lift potential in the high-impasto black strokes at the centre and at transitions where paint meets unpainted canvas. - Minor flaking at the edges of the red passage where it meets the white ground. - The paint-to-paper interface is a structural weak point: where heavy black strokes sit over collaged tickets, the bond depends on acrylic adhering to paper that is itself lifting. SUPPORT, sound: - Good overall canvas tension with no pronounced bulging or slackness. - Corners square, with no acute distortion. - Subtle undulation along the bottom edge, suggesting minor humidity movement or slight stretcher irregularity. - Normal draw marks at left and right edges from stretching. No ground flaking or delamination. SURFACE: - Uniformly matte. No varnish or sealant has been applied; the surface is unprotected. - Light dust accumulation on horizontal paint surfaces in the lower composition. - Minor scuffs on the red passage and faint marks on the white ground, consistent with handling without protective covering. - Faint pressure lines at the upper edge suggest prior contact with glazing. No permanent damage evident. CONSERVATION REQUIREMENTS PRIORITY ACTIONS: 1. Consolidate the lifting and curling collage edges, starting with the right margin and the upper right ticket cluster. This is the most urgent intervention; lifted paper catches on packing material and tears. 2. Obtain a conservator's opinion on fixing the exposed carbon and charcoal lines. As with other works in this collection carrying friable media, this is a judgement call: fixing prevents smudging but alters surface character. Document the decision either way. 3. Address the thermal-print fading. This cannot be reversed, so the response must be documentary: photograph or transcribe every legible ticket, boarding pass, and border pass at high resolution NOW, recording carrier, route, date, and any reference numbers, before the print disappears. See the digital record note below regarding resolution. 4. Maintain relative humidity at 45 to 55% and keep it stable. The collage layer is the element that responds to fluctuation. As a linen canvas carrying acrylic paint and polymer adhesive, the painted structure is comparatively stable: keep in stable relative humidity, avoid direct sunlight, dust with a soft dry brush only and never over the carbon lines or lifting collage, do not use solvents on the acrylic surface, and support the stretcher when handling. The archivist's requirement for a climate-controlled environment is retained and reinforced. Boarding passes, border passes, airline tickets and train tickets are acidic commercial stocks never intended to last; continued deterioration (yellowing, embrittlement, ink fading, acid migration into adjacent paint and adhesive) should be treated as an ongoing risk. Assessment by a paper conservator is recommended. Per the archivist's note, the tickets ranged in age between 15 and 5 years old as of 2026, and all organic materials are to be taken into consideration at every inspection and asset-management or repair cycle. The archivist's specified housing is retained: encased preservation framing, with Conservation Clear glass offering 99% UV protection but lacking an anti-reflective coating and therefore prone to greater glare. Any glazing must be held clear of the surface with a spacer deep enough to clear the 3 to 5 mm impasto, so that nothing contacts the lifting collage or the friable carbon. Lighting should be maximised in a northern-light setting with minimal direct glare in the installation lighting layout. The work should be reframed and inspected for management upkeep every 5 years. UV-filtering glazing is required. The saturated reds, yellows and oranges are the passages most at risk of fading, here the red passage in the upper right. Note that light exposure also accelerates thermal-print loss on the tickets, so the case for limiting and logging exposure is doubled on this work. DIGITAL RECORD The original capture was scanned in Sweden as a TIFF master in high, medium, and low resolution variants. The high-resolution master is held outside this archive and has NOT been uploaded to this record. CURRENT ASSET: TIFF, medium-resolution variant, 3270 x 4000 pixels, 37.5 MB. Filename TheTravelingGreifAlijilaMed.tif. Uploaded 2026-09-10. NOTE: This is the MEDIUM tier of the scan set, as the filename indicates, not the full-resolution master. It is an uncompressed TIFF of the same pixel dimensions as the JPEG derivative it replaced, so while image quality is improved by the removal of JPEG compression, the resolution is unchanged. This is a format upgrade, not a resolution upgrade. Effective scan resolution: approximately 155 DPI measured against the recorded physical dimensions. This is roughly half the 300 DPI archival standard. Because this work is physically large at 65 x 54 cm, a pixel count that would be adequate for a smaller piece is not adequate here. Maximum reproduction size at 300 DPI: 10.9 x 13.3 inches (27.7 x 33.8 cm). The physical work measures 21.3 x 25.6 inches. The work therefore CANNOT be reproduced at actual size from this file; the ceiling is roughly half scale on each axis.

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