Faculty of Art

Drawing and Painting

Ariana Fraser

Precipice

I don't want the melancholy of love-lost anymore. I want futurity, conviction, pain only when necessary and not in large doses. I want to get older, I want to be an old woman, I want a daughter. No more of this wilfully accepted loneliness - I feel the humid evening air for the first time in 3 years and just like that I'm walking away from the ledge and into the veldt. The taste of metal comes only from biting another's tongue, never my own, and the skin on my feet grows softer with every barefooted step. I will cry until I can't breathe anymore, and then cry more. I will lay on the bathroom floor, flayed open and calling out, and a voice will return. No more melancholy. Only desire, and blood and the beat of my heart. I open the gate. I cross the Threshold. I close the gate, but leave it unlocked."Vessels and Vestiges" is a history of belonging/non-belonging told through the physical remnants of intimacy that take shape alongside memory. In these personal reflections, the ephemeral meets the tangible within the dwelling, revealing the stories of experience witnessed, and carrying forward a recollection of embodied existence.