Navigating Grief Through Abstract Art

Holding Pattern Series – No. 7 of 8 (shared in reverse)

Prison - Original photograph collaboration between Ava Bock (me) and model MissD

There are things no one can explain to you in advance. Not because they are unknowable, but because they cannot fully be known until you are inside them.

Navigating the Elements was created in one of those moments: the disorienting hours after my father's death, when something irreversible had happened, but there had been no time yet for that reality to settle. There were people to contact, decisions to make, and practical things to handle while I still tried to comprehend what had changed.

I have explored experiences of confinement, isolation, and internal struggle through my work before. Photography was once my primary language for approaching experiences that were difficult to articulate. Years later, abstraction has given me another way of doing that. Instead of depicting the circumstances themselves, I can work with line, material, movement, and space to respond to what an experience leaves behind.

Navigating the Elements began that way.

I made the drawing on paper, which matters because the entire Holding Pattern series marks a departure from my usual surface. I typically draw on recycled polyester synthetic paper, a smooth, nonporous material that allows ink to sit and move across the surface rather than immediately absorbing into it. For Holding Pattern, I returned to paper.

More specifically, I returned to the same 6 × 6-inch artist tiles I had used for the Untangled series in 2020. Five years earlier, I had worked on those small sheets during another period of profound uncertainty and change. I wasn't consciously trying to connect the two bodies of work through material. The paper was simply what I had begun using for Holding Pattern, but as the series developed, that connection became increasingly difficult for me to ignore.

Paper changes how the ink behaves. Unlike the recycled polyester synthetic paper I usually use, traditional paper absorbs the ink into its fibers. It catches, spreads, and blooms across the surface, letting the material itself participate in the marks. In Navigating the Elements, green, blue, and brown lines accumulated across the small square into something I could not yet explain.

The marks came before the meaning.

I wasn't trying to make a picture of grief or document my father's death. I was responding to the sensation of moving through circumstances that had suddenly become unfamiliar. The world had not stopped, even though part of mine had. Things still needed to happen, and I had to navigate them before I understood where I was going.

That experience gave the drawing its title: Navigating the Elements.

The return to paper throughout Holding Pattern also stayed with me. Untangled and Holding Pattern came from very different experiences, separated by five years, yet both developed in the same small paper format during periods when my life circumstances were changing around me. I had not set out to create that connection. It emerged through the material itself.

That is something I continue to find compelling about materials. I can choose them deliberately for their physical properties, archival qualities, or the way they interact with other elements of a work. But sometimes meaning develops through use. An ordinary studio material becomes connected to a place, a period of time, or a particular experience simply because it was there.

Navigating the Elements is the seventh work in Holding Pattern, a series of eight drawings created during the months surrounding my father's care, death, and its aftermath. Each drawing emerged from a different point within that experience rather than from a predetermined narrative. This one came from the rupture itself, when there was almost no distance between experience and making.

I don't make work like this because I believe art resolves grief. This drawing did not make the circumstances easier or provide an answer for what had happened. Making it gave physical form to something I did not yet have language for. Sometimes that is all I need the work to do.

A piece of paper, some ink, and the act of making marks can become a record of a moment before I fully understand what that moment will mean.