Notes on despair
by Gabriele Renard
Notes on despair is a series of three pieces, intimate and personal, taken from my private notebooks. Slightly altered for presentation, they come from a place of distress and reflect my ongoing struggle with mental health, most particularly with disgust, neglect and exhaustion. Three things I try to find catharsis from with art.
I usually write much longer texts, mixing prose and poetry to thought rambling. Notes on despair definitely is on the shorter side, but I feel it represents me much better than any other of my previous work. Perhaps because it comes from somewhere more vulnerable, somewhere more hurt, and carries the inability to hide or dilute itself behind length. The repetition presents in the work comes from my own reaction to trauma and stress, usually getting stuck and looping on ill thoughts, self-deprecation and eventually tiredness.
Gabriele Renard is a multidisciplinary artist from Belgium currently living in Edinburgh. Recurring themes appearing in their work include rage, grief, the figure of the mother and gender identity. They have recently been published in issue 6 of Little Living Room and are a part of the art collective School of the Damned.