Catharsis: A Grief Drawn Out

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Catharsis: A Grief Drawn Out is an artist memoir that explores the visualization of loss; the relationship between the creative act and healing by interrogating the drawings and paintings of artist Janet McKenzie made since the diagnosis of her husband Michael Spens’s Stage 4 cancer in 1996. The inscrutable works create a visual narrative to describe the bewildering experience of living with the 6-week to 6-month prognoses issued and outlived for 18 years. With a Foreword by Dame Laura Lee, CEO of Maggie’s’ the memoir provides a unique insight into navigating cancer, loss and the transformative potential of creative expression.

Janet McKenzie’s art practice combines painting, drawing, printmaking and writing. She studied at the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, the Canberra School of Art, and the University of St Andrews. She has published extensively on contemporary art practice, particularly drawing and edited Studio International (2000 – 2013).

Her art practice distils emotional experience into ordered visual forms. Through mark making she has evolved an organic language of abstraction, blurring the boundaries between drawing and painting. The lexicon of natural forms become metaphors, poetic symbols to conjure emotional states.