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Bitter Sweet

  • meg ivy brunning

My recent on going project: 'Bittersweet ’ divulges into the hard truths of grief, after my Father passed away last October from Cancer. Creating a multitude of work of different medias, it chronicles my journey thus far. “It’s about trying to understand what I’m feeling while feeling it … Grief is different for [everybody] and I wanted to document my journey. All of my work in the past has been about documenting certain parts of my life or trying to understand certain parts of my life, mostly from my past, I think this piece of work is so important because it’s about my present life … and for once I’m not worrying about any of the other tenses. There’s something so real and raw about what I’m doing right now, that just feels right. I hope people can relate to what I’m making.” Painting, poetry, music and other mediums have combined together to create this on going project, which will debut later this year at the UAL Camberwell Graduate Degree Show.

bitter sweet feels like home but at the same time it’s a foreign place. it’s a place where strangers pass you and don’t give you a second glance or a place where you struggle to understand how the streets are laid out so you get lost.


its feeling as if you had been there before — something like déjà vu.


bitter sweet is coping with losing something. it’s trying to pick up coins when you accidentally dropped them on a bus in Chelsea, the driver had to get out to pick up those two 20p’s you couldn’t find based on just his instructions.


bitter sweet is trying to find that thing you lost in places it had never been or places it had been, but the traces are no longer there. it’s your vision being blurry, or not being able to walk in a straight line (even if you tell your friends and those two men on the southbound platform that you can). it’s that gust of wind that makes you close your eyes, turning the other way so your hair is no longer in your face as the tube approaches the platform.


it’s losing your friends in that one dodgy place in Peckham you always go too, having to rely on your voice and the brightness from your phone screen to keep you company, while you try to relocate them (before finding them in the smoking area making friends and that sudden cheer they always do when someone reappears again)


its everything and nothing.


no one ever tells you about the side effects that come along with grief,


and,


all it ever will be,

or at least for now,

is bitter sweet.

photo of my dad in his 20s down his local pub, a photo that has popped up a lot in the last few months for me.

it was a way to connect to him without him being physically present, something that has become increasingly important to me.
a photograph of bitter sweet being exhibited at the "open studios" at camberwell college of arts.
GRIEF ISN’T LINEAR
IT’S NOT A STORY BOOK THAT HAS A BEGINNING MIDDLE AND END
IT’S A CONSTANT
AND IT JUST CONTINUES
TO EXIST BESIDE YOU
LIKE SOMEONE SITTING NEXT TO YOU ON A BUS
OR THE TREES THAT BLUR PAST YOU WHEN YOU’RE LYING DOWN AT THE BACK OF THE CAR ON A LONG ROAD TRIP
OR LIKE THAT ONE SONG YOU PLAY OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN
the end of the bitter sweet era, for now.

but the start of something bigger then i would have ever wondered or imagined.

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