Anonymous Sorrow – a collection of works on paper by artist Ann-Marie Stillion combining text and photography along with two large-scale works on silk – the project began in October 2023. “I saw a short video on Twitter from a local Gazan journalist. Two boys were running fast out of a cloud of smoke. As they approached the camera, I could see they were carrying another boy between them using their arms like a sling. One foot dangled from his leg barely attached, waving wildly.
A year before I had suffered a bad accident, almost breaking my foot off. I was lucky a good friend was down the street and she quickly drove me to an emergency room a quarter of a mile away. By morning I was in surgery. I am fine now—no significant effects. I realized that if he lived he might never walk again, at least not easily, and the main difference between the two of us was I lived in one of the richest cities in the world and he lived in one of the poorest.
I wanted to create something that would make his broken body stay with me, so I wouldn’t forget this awful truth.”
Outtake from Ann-Marie Stillion’s installation video of Anonymous Sorrow launched August 2024
To begin, I wrote phrases and thoughts as I pushed myself to understand what was happening before my eyes. I decided to apply historic wooden typesetting with letterpress to create poetic hybrids, printing key phrases onto archival pigment prints. The images come from my photo archive from 2005 to 2023, shot on both film and digital cameras.
To view the installation video, Anonymous Sorrow, click here