Kimberly's art installation

Nearly two years have gone by since I last saw Kimberly. The last time I saw her, we met for coffee, and she was confiding in me her grief because her sister had been killed in gun violence. I was struggling to be present with her grief, because I was receiving texts from my daughter Palesa, telling me she was desperately ill and couldn’t breathe in the smoke. Riots had broken out; her township was on fire. I was frightened and felt far away, unable to do anything to help her. Palesa died six days later, and I fell into a hole of grief so deep that I have no memories of the succeeding months. 

Since then Kimberly and her husband have stabilized financially. They have been able to stay in their apartment, and she has been using art to work with her grief for her sister. Kimberly is a photographer, but she has a degree in technical theatre, and she used her set-building and lighting skills (and more) to build this installation, now showing at a pop-up art gallery. It’s a multi-sensory immersive diorama: see, touch, smell, hear. She created it as a tribute to her sister, a way of working through grief and moving into the joy that her sister embodied. It smells like a forest after the rain (she uses an aromatherapy infuser), it has an other-worldly sound track, a video of a waterfall and rotating lights, and she urges people to touch it, to bend down and see the kaleidoscope in what looks like a fallen tree, to finger the mushrooms, and to find the many little glass “gems” that are hidden in the “forest.”

Grief has its way with us. Sometimes we have to make things.