Catharsis: A Grief Drawn Out – book review

To what extent can the visual language of grief be translated? Janet McKenzie looks back over 20 years’ worth of drawings in search of words

Catharsis: A Grief Drawn Out by Janet McKenzie, published by Birlinn Limited, 2025.

reviewed by ANNA McNAY

“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” writes Susan Sontag in her essay Illness as Metaphor.¹ Not everyone, however, knows what it is like to use the “bad passport” early in life. I certainly do. I have lived my life with one foot permanently in either camp: the living and well myself, but caring for others who are dying; and the sick and dying myself, being cared for dutifully by others. Together, my parents and I have danced a dance of being primarily on one side or the other. As the carer for nearly two decades of her terminally ill husband, Michael Spens, the then editor of Studio International, Janet McKenzie certainly knows life in both kingdoms as well.

In On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf writes: “[L]et a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him.”² There is no language for pain. It is, therefore, hardly a surprise, that, being an artist as well as a writer, McKenzie should have turned to the visual as an outlet for her chronic anticipatory grief and purgatory of bereavement, as Spens outlived his six-weeks-to live (or should that be six-weeks-to-die?) cancer prognosis by 15 years. Although unaware of their significance or healing potential at the time, McKenzie has now turned to her wordsmithery to begin to analyse her drawings and paintings made over the last two decades. In the preface to the resulting book-cum-memoir, Catharsis: A Grief Drawn Out, she writes: “With hindsight I realised that my drawings were created from deep within to insinuate love, loss, and fear … In describing or interrogating the drawings, I hoped I would be able to confront and accept the trauma over the 20-year period and move forward.”

Janet McKenzie. Memento Mori (Wormiston Tower), 2008. Ink on Khadi paper, 30 x 32 cm. © The Artist.

The book begins with an introduction to the timeline of events – helpful for the reader to begin to grasp the enormity of what McKenzie has been through (as a wife and primary – or, so it seems, sole – carer, and as a mother of three young girls) – with Spens’s initial diagnosis of stage-four renal cell carcinoma in 1996, then his further diagnosis of 40-plus secondary tumours on the liver, along with spinal metastases, four years later, bringing with them the six-week prognosis, followed by his treatment with interferon, two dramatic seizures (one on the edge of Oban Pier in Argyll, where the location nearly killed him, even when the medical emergency itself did not), and his ultimate nearly two-decade-long defiance of his sentence. Details of this story are repeated multiple times throughout the book, although the timeline remains somewhat confused and confusing, offering a sense of just how heavily it must all have weighed on and mystified McKenzie, and how omnipresent the threat and uncertainty of an ever-changing prognosis were. The ensuing chapters move through groupings of drawings and paintings – reproduced as 88 high-quality colour images (out of more than 300 works made during the time) – accompanied by McKenzie’s musings and realisations, some from conversations with artist and psychotherapist friends, spanning her typically sub- or unconscious use of Jungian archetypes, folkloric symbols and motifs borrowed from the history of art.

Janet McKenzie. Couple with Bird (after Mirka), 2002. Pen and ink, 30 x 21 cm. © The Artist.

For example, many of the figures that McKenzie now identifies as self-portraits lack hands (for example, Couple with Bird [after Mirka], 2002, and Two Birds and Me, 2010). Looking back, she recognises these as referencing the archetype of the handless maiden, found in the Brothers Grimm and various other folk and fairy tales. She writes: “I created my images, not from prior literary knowledge; subconsciously I presented my unfulfilled creative life as that of a handless maiden, surrounded by birds and living in a foreign land.”

Janet McKenzie. Two Birds and Me, 2010. Pastel on Carson paper, 32 x 25 cm. © The Artist.

Unfulfilled creativity is just a part of the traditional symbolism here, with the maiden also representing a broader loss of agency (McKenzie’s life was put on hold while she obeyed the needs of her husband’s), vulnerability and a loss of connection to the world (this might be clarified as “the world of the living”). As Raïna Manuel-Paris writes: “The grief of the handless maiden relates to her understanding that she no longer belongs in the world of her father, her inability to touch the world or be fed by it, her lack of embrace, all reflect a dismemberment of the human feeling, seeing, touching, holding and healing functions. Her loss of a sensual and instinctual life is complete.”³ Seen with a more positive spin, the handless maiden’s experience can be viewed as a shamanic journey, where marginalisation and suffering lead to a deeper understanding of herself and a return to wholeness – as McKenzie is finally experiencing now. It is worth noting that images made since Spens’s death – for example, After the Volcano (2015) – depict the figure of McKenzie with hands once more.

Janet McKenzie. After the Volcano, 2015. Pen and ink, 30 x 42 cm. © The Artist.

Another self-portraying motif is that of a house without windows (for example, Funeral, 2011), suggesting McKenzie’s inability to envisage her own future (while her daughters’ houses are thankfully less architecturally impoverished). Such a house appears in the story of Jekyll and Hyde, where Hyde’s house is described as a “dingy windowless structure”. As Hyde becomes more powerful, the house becomes a “house of voluntary bondage”, reflecting also how McKenzie is enslaved to Spens and unable to live her own life.⁴

Janet McKenzie. Funeral, 2011. Felt pen and gouache on Khadi paper, 30 x 33 cm. © The Artist.

In literature and art, windows often represent a pathway to the outside world, symbolising the human desire for exploration, freedom and escape from confinement or limitations; in dreams, they can represent new perspectives and opportunities. In McKenzie’s case, the lack of windows represents the opposite: a much curtailed and entrapped life. In her own words: “the erosion of self, of feeling distressed and under-valued”.

Janet McKenzie. Untitled (After Australia), 2011. Watercolour and pastel, 30 x 40 cm. © The Artist.

Notions of home and the tension between her native Australia and her chosen family home of Scotland – the “foreign land” just mentioned – are explored elsewhere, too. Returning to Australia for an extended period after Spens’s death, McKenzie must confront the reactions of her friends and family, acknowledging the consolation of a known land and climate and the great open space, but the sense of this no longer being the refuge that it once was. She notes, also, how in attempting to give visual form to absence, she increases her receptivity to spiritual presences and to metaphor and meaning within the ancient landscape. This leads to her finding inspiration in Australian Aboriginal art, which “teaches us the importance of the land in their understanding of Dreamtime, where they come from, and it has encouraged me to immerse myself in nature in order to connect to the wider universe and in the process to try to see death not as fearful but as part of a human existence”. The work of the Australian artist Arthur Boyd, on whom McKenzie wrote her PhD thesis, unsurprisingly also has an influence on her work (for example, Sea Journey, West Coast, 2015), as does the painting of Wassily Kandinsky (for example, Orange Hill, 2004) and Anselm Kiefer (for example, Falling House, 2008), the latter being an artist notoriously haunted by the past, its atrocities and unlawful deaths. Motifs such as the ladder (for example, Impossible and Moving Towards the Sun, both 2011) and floating figures (for example, Lovers, 2009) come from the work of the Russian émigré Marc Chagall, who, for example, designed the stained-glass window for a chapel in Tudeley, Kent, to commemorate a young woman, Sarah d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, who drowned aged 21 in a sailing accident, and in which a ladder reaches up from the sea to Christ on the cross, marking her pathway to heaven.

Janet McKenzie. Birds, 2015. Brush and ink. © The Artist.

McKenzie notes having employed a lexicon of natural forms since her teens, and, amid much Matissean foliage, a key symbol in many of these works is the bird (there are too many examples to give, but Birds (2015), Two Birds (2011), Widow (2014), etc). Birds, she says, akin to Sontag’s opening statement, have the “ability to inhabit two worlds [earth and sky], thus questioning what it is like to be posed at a point before death”. McKenzie’s drawings teeter not only on the brink of living and dying, but on the edge of vulnerability and powerlessness, on the one hand, and strength and anger, on the other. Her chainsaw woodcuts (2013-14), for example, combine a tool of destruction of industrial scale with fragile and intimate drawings, in many ways the most gentle in the book, with their calming sea blues, warming orange and, seemingly a most basic form for McKenzie, the repeated fan-shape, calling to mind the Sydney opera house. They speak of her fears and frustrations, and the many taboo feelings experienced by a carer who was not only being taken for granted and losing her own life in the process, but also subject to the patient’s “irrational and controlling behaviour” and his “audacity” to survive against the odds. The Wood’s in Trouble (2016), in contrast, is made by the more exacting drypoint etching technique, but McKenzie employs it angrily to “gouge” the copper plate allowing “the venting of a sense of unfairness of illness”.

Janet McKenzie. The Wood’s in Trouble, 2016. Drypoint etching, 25 x 36 cm. © The Artist.

Janet McKenzie. Salve (viii) Birds, 2013-23. Oil on canvas, 60 x 90 cm. © The Artist.

The final chapter of the book presents McKenzie’s Salve series (2010-22), made by her returning to previously unresolved pictures and working over them until they have been “salvaged”. This might seem to offer a neat tying up of loose ends and successful closure, but this is not the case. It is here that Tess Jaray’s words, cited by McKenzie in her introduction, come into their own: “I don’t believe that it is ever possible to fully understand one’s work. There is a difference between ‘meaning’ and ‘meaning something’. I used to worry about not understanding what I made, or at least having to wait a long time, in the way you write about. Now I believe it’s probably better not to understand, otherwise there is a danger of explaining something away.” Nowhere is this better instantiated than in McKenzie’s drawings. While they indeed offer a language for the citizens of the land of the sick, and their (in)voluntary travel companions, where written language fails, they are accordingly stymied by their implicit untranslatability, sentenced to remain explicable only insofar as they already visually are. A form of catharsis, then, yes, but closure, no. As McKenzie makes clear in her preface: “Closure is not in fact the destination of grief; rather, one learns to live with loss. I see it like a door without a latch: poignant episodes can fling it open again, as with gusts of wind. It cannot be achieved, and maintained; rather, loss never leaves one but informs every aspect of existence.” To feel perhaps less alone in one’s linguistically impaired state is, however, surely a blessing, and that is something simple, yet, broadly unmanageable, that McKenzie, through this book, is able to achieve. She adds: “A single narrative cannot provide a definitive prescription; rather it is part of a conversation that contributes to the manner in which we tackle the taboo subject of grief as a society. It is a component of consciousness-raising in order to assuage loss and isolation in the wider secular context, and I hope that others experiencing terminal illness either as patient or carer will experience a sense of emotional recognition, and therefore understand that they are part of a bigger experience and that the visualisation of loss is a means through which we can define our shared humanity.” May McKenzie’s insights be as reassuring and comforting to herself as they doubtless will to others.

• Catharsis: A Grief Drawn Out by Janet McKenzie is published by Birlinn Limited, price £16.99.

References
1. Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag, in Essays of the 1960s & 70s, Library of America, New York, 2013, page 677.
2. On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf, Ashfield MA, 2012 (1930), page 7.
3. Re-membering: A Mythopoetic Interpretation of The Handless Maiden by Raïna Manuel-Paris, Joseph Campbell Foundation website, 2019.
4. Gothic Settings & Symbolism, English Lit: AQA GCSE Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Seneca Notes online.