Grief II: RUPTURE
5-colour reduction linocut | Limited Edition of 10 | 2026 SouthSeaEyes
—
Pressing first anniversary
Bifurcated our together
Decapitated our forever
Flayed our love
Contained brine inside lids
Leaves
Soggy pillows nightly
-Nusye McComish, accompanying poem, Grief II: Ruptured
Grief II: Rupture is the second work in an ongoing autoethnographic series documenting bereavement from the inside.
Grief I: Sutured with Longings of you bound. It held. It attempted, desperately, to keep together what had already been torn apart – the triple organza layers, the red thread, the figures foetal and contained. It was the body’s first response to profound rupture: press the wound closed, hold the edges, suture. Found here: https://southseaeyes.me/2025/10/07/sutured/
This is what comes after.
Grief II: Rupture follows Grief I: Suture, which was bound and held together by red thread. This piece names what happens when containment fails – the rupture that follows the suture, the pressure the body takes on when core absence has no outlet. The audience is not offered relief. They are asked to sit with it, within it.
Grief II: Rupture does not hold. It cannot. A year in, the sutures have failed and what remains is the plan, unadorned fact of the cleft – open, unresolved, and bleeding in a way that does not stop and will not be staunched by time or will or the well-meaning language of recovery.
There is no recovery. That word belongs to illness. The bereaved are not sick. What they are is permanently altered – carrying a wound that does not close, walking a landscape that has been fundamentally and irrevocable changed. The horizon offers no resolution. It offers only continuation.
This is the continuation.
The image
On the print: A hand presses a face. Brow, palm, cheek are locked in. The eyes are shut and shadowed, absent to the viewer. What remains is the compression: fingers segmented, knuckles jaunt, catching light, that slight distortion where flesh yields to pressure. The image is mechanical – and human at once, and it does not offer resolution.
In this, the reduction process mirrors the subject’s theme. Five layers carved in sequence – four blues descending from pale to deep, the final layer black – each pass destroying what came before it on the block. No earlier state is recoverable. the block that made the earlier layers of this print no longer exists. The printed work holds what the process consumed.
A poem accompanies this reduction lino print;
The language is violent, as is the experience of grief. Bifurcated. Decapitated. Flayed. These are not metaphors chosen for effect. They are the most accurate words available for what loss does to a life built for two – a life that assumed its own continuation, that had a forever, that was ours and is now irrevocably past tense. The clinical precision of the surgical vocabulary is deliberate. Grief is not soft. It is not a fog to move through. It is a severing, and the body knows it as such.
Contained brine inside lids is the body holding itself together. Barely.
Leaves … is the ongoing departure – not past, not completed, but present tense and continuous. He leaves. Grief leaves. The leaving does not stop.
Soggy pillows nightly is the evidence. The body’s nightly accounting of what has been lost.
The Process
Grief II: Rupture is a 5-colour reduction linocut. Four layers of blue – pale to deep, light becoming darkness – then the final layer : black. Each pass carved into the same block, each state destroying what preceded it. The block that made these ten prints no longer exists. No earlier states is recoverable.
The reduction process – one of the early reasons why I admit love/hate relationship with this method – is that it does not permit revision. Each cut is committed. Each layer pulled is permanent. What is removed cannot be restored. The block is consumed in the making of the work.
This is also a document. The printmaking is auto ethnography – the hand-wrought image as primary record of interior experience. These ten prints are not illustration …they are evidence.
SUNDERED
Alongside the Grief II: Rupture, I include Sundered – a charcoal work made in the same month, in the same register. Where the reduction lino is controlled and sequential, the charcoal is whole-body: shoulder, arm, weight dragged across the A2 strathmore paper as surface. Beneath the black marks, words burnt in orange – the vocabulary of violence – surface in fragments. TORN. REND. The language exists underneath. the force came after.
Both works ask the same thing of the viewer: to sit with the rupture. Not to resolve, or feel consoled from it. Rather, it is an invitation to witness what a year of this grieving actually looks like from the inside.
Pressing Matters Magazine: Issue 35, Black&Blue Print Challenge
Grief II: Rupture is submitted to Pressing Matters Magazine Issue 35, for July 2026 edition, John Coe’s Black & Blue Print Challenge. the print and its accompanying seven-line poem are submitted as a single work – image and language inseparable, each doing what the other cannot. Whether the poem can be displayed with the print, if indeed it is accepted, is fully at John’s discretion. The aim of this work, as ever, is as both record and providing vocabulary in text and visual language for those affected by traumatic bereavement.
Black and Blue. The colours of this print …and the condition it documents.
This is the next work in an ongoing autoethnographic series of unknown length. The series, like grief itself, has no planned resolution.
Accompanying poem – GRIEF II: RUPTURE
I.
Riptide slashes memories
He is home. Misting rearview.
Lost. In memories of us.
We were young
Hindsight show cute pair
Dead now.
Youth bloomed now mangled
Joy toddling and grown
Silent urn.
Spring-petalled blooms scattered in Underworld
Muzzled rage licking wounds’ edges
II.
Pressing first anniversary
Bifurcated our together
Decapitated our forever
Flayed our love
Contained brine inside lids
Leaves
Soggy pillows nightly
III.
Oscillating. Ruptured landscape. Bond continued.
In cold blood. Untethered.
First year blurred broke open.
Jolts. Jagged. Cautious treading.
Eye brimming with involuntary tear.
Jaw clenched. Bruxism.
Molar hairline fracture.
Enduring living as grindstone.
Sandpaper grating eyes onward.
-Nusye McComish, SouthSeaEyes 2026-
Eleven Months In: A Widow’s Poem and Autoethnographic Note – Writing Grief From Inside The Data
Eleven Months In: A Widow’s Poem and Autoethnographic Note — Writing Grief From Inside the Data. A printmaker and widow documents her second poem eleven months after her husband’s death. Written and revised in April 2026, this autoethnographic accompaniment note records the body’s timelagged update — the hands that grip, the abdomen that curls, the 400 thread count cotton that holds temperature for one. No retrospective wisdom. Zero resolution. Primary-source grief, written from inside the data. Published by Nusye McComish – SouthSeaEyes Printmaker. Thursday 2nd April 2026
Nine Months In
Personal essay of grief writing about waking into loss. For those in traumatic bereavement who find the body remembers before the mind catches up.
First Winter
Field notes from traumatic bereavement: documenting grief’s administrative violence, temporal mechanisms, and survival at 8-9 months post-loss.
Grief on the Body: Embodied Loss and Creative Practice as Record
This essay documents grief as a lived bodily state and considers creative practice not as recovery or remedy, but as record: work made alongside life, under altered conditions.
First Christmas
When your husband was Christmas, you inherit the Turkey Problem. Navigating the first Christmas bereaved – the unfathomable grief, the planning, picking up broken pieces.
