Julia Kristeva asks in her book Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, (1992) if the beautiful can be sad. If ‘beauty is inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning’. She wonders if the beautiful object is the one that tirelessly returns following destructions and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible’. Blejerman has spent the last decade exploring through her practice the
materiality of absence: the absent body, the absent woman, and the invisible woman artist. This investigation led to the production of a series of large scaled printed digital paintings offered as part of burial ceremonies including A Visual Theory of the Soul Ceremony, held behind Wadsley Cemetery, Sheffield, and exhibited at VOMA Space, (2020); The Soil Where Women (Dis)appear, Newcastle University, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape funded by the Institute for Creative Arts Practice (2021) and at The International Lab for
the Nature of Burials and Contemporary Fine Art, an ongoing artwork produced through a series of online conversations. As well as the collaboration with artist Nick Stewart in his film As Sure as the Rain (2017), awarded a Silver Laurel by the Independent Film Awards in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and her texts have been published in the U.K., France and U.S.A. Blejerman is currently working on a PhD at Sheffield Hallam University, Fine Art Department where she also is an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art.
J. Kristeva Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Columbia University Press (1992)
DIPSACUS FULLONUM – Common tease!, July 2020
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