“Grief is the most human of experiences, other than being born and dying.”
(Dr. Ramani Durvasula)
Loss, death, and grief are unavoidable chapters of the human experience. Yet, we are consistently unprepared to encounter and navigate such moments when they inevitably occur. Why? In my grief, I face depths of denial that feel equally as raw as the experience of death itself. In the past six and a half years, I have lost three grandmothers, one grandfather, four aunts, three uncles, and my mother. This count does not include friends. These losses sharpened my awareness of the transient nature of our being and allowed me to notice the bittersweetness of I will not experience this moment everagain.
My work is autobiographical and archival, reflecting loss, specifically of the matriline of my family. I focus on the grief I hold for the women in my family because I feel especially lost without their guidance. I step into a place of creative assumption to guide myself through life in their absence.
Recent works include installation, writing, performance, sculpture, and photography. Working through various media allows me to express narratives based on what the work demands. I begin with an idea and then a question: how is this story asking to be told? Each life, death, and grief experience is unique, as should be the work that represents it.
Themes and motifs often found throughout my work include repetition and references to time, effort, and labor. I am interested in our efforts as humans to cope with living with and without those we find close. I think sometimes, when our loved ones die, our efforts intensify as a Sisyphean effort to rekindle what has been lost.
Questions I am currently investigating in my art practice: How do we know something or someone lived? How much of grief is societally implemented, and how much is built into our existence as living beings? Is mourning the dead a hard and fast rule of being alive? How else will you know you love someone?
Madisyn Lynn Simington (she/they) graduated in 2022 from Penn State University Altoona College with a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Art Studies and in 2024 from Penn State University Park with a Master of Fine Arts in Art. Simington explores grief, death, and the accompanying rituals through performance, installation, sculpture, photography, and written word.
Simington’s work explores and reflects on the matriline of their family and the aftermath of losing such influential women. Other subtle threads of interest throughout their work include PTSD, LGBTQ+ identity, and the intersectionality of existence.
Simington’s visual work has been featured in the McLanahan and Sheetz galleries as part of Penn State Altoona’s VAST exhibitions, Penn State Altoona’s African American Read-In, at the Zoller Gallery and Palmer Museum of Art in State College, PA. Their written work has been published in Hard Freight Literary Magazine and in the 2024 Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize Anthology.