Hope Esser’s senior art show, titled “15R/16M,” was on display in Fisher Hall before spring break. The show utilized a wide variety of mediums and used the space creatively to create an emotional self portrait of one person’s experience with the process of grief.

Esser’s show was an intensely personal one: its subject was the death of her best friend and Esser’s subsequent struggle to cope with the event. Her friend, mentioned in the show only by her first name — Julia — passed away sixteen months ago (the opening of the show coincided with the sixteen month anniversary of her death), and trhough her art Esser chronicled her subsequent journey through the emotional struggles of grief.

In her artist’s statement and in an interview, Esser stressed her  early reluctance to talk about her friend’s death. Not only was she nervous about other people’s reactions, but she was also aware of how taboo a subject death can be. Esser found that her reticence surrounding her ordeal only caused her more pain.

“I think it took me a while to realize that to stifle it and not talk about it is the worst thing you can do,” Esser said. “[There was also] no way I could not talk about it and make good art.”

While she wasn’t speaking about the emotional ordeal she was undergoing, Esser found that she was expressing her grief in her art. By not speaking about the subject of her work, however, she says that she realized she wasn’t allowing people to fully understand and experience her art.

“I’ve had a lot of people tell me how much they understand my past work now — I wasn’t letting them get it before,” Esser explained. “I’ve had some really good responses to [the show]. People have responded very well to my honesty.”

One reason the show is so compelling is Esser’s effort to communicate honestly about its subject. Each portion is accompanied by an explanation of how it relates to her process of grief and how her experience of Julia’s death has changed and developed along with her art.

“This has been very therapeutic for me in a lot of ways. My emotional and artistic development have gone on the same path,” Esser said.

The unifying motif of the show is a simple men’s shirt that Julia gave to Esser before she died. Julia had tailored several of her late father’s old shirts to fit her, as a way of remembering him. She gave Esser one of these, and Esser used it in her expression of her own grief over Julia’s death.

Esser decided to take the shirt apart as a part of her grief process at the end of Winter Term. As she wasn’t immediately ready to take the final step of destroying such an emotional object, Esser decided to document it first. This final show was the product of her efforts to document the shirt.

Every aspect is centered on this striped men’s shirt, size 15R, from which Esser drew the show’s title. It can be seen in various forms from the stitched outline of the shirt on canvas, to oil paintings of the shirt in various states of disarray, to the sixteen stitched etchings onto vellum, titled “Sixteen Months.” The piece deals with Esser’s struggle to realize that grief isn’t a process that works “like time…I have my own clock.” In one piece, a rear projection onto tracing paper, the viewer watches Esser’s back as she walks slowly through a wintry field, followed by snaking lines of colored threads.

“This piece was based off of a dream I had where these stripes I’d been seeing for months started following me everywhere I went…I accepted that no matter what, [Julia’s death] would always be a part of me,” Esser explained.

The final part of the show that Esser constructed was one of its most evocative, as it was the piece that documented Esser’s final destruction of Julia’s shirt. In the back of Fisher, she hung strips of the shirt that she had cut and resewed into a long, winding scarf. Hanging from thin threads from the ceiling, the scarf wound up and above a projection of an hour-long continuous shot of Esser deconstructing and resewing the cloth.

Accompanying the work was a short description of how the display related to Julia’s death and of Esser’s experience in coming to terms with it. Once the viewer becomes aware of the ramifications of the piece, the scarf becomes comparable to a climb out of and above the dim gallery space. It is as if Julia, Esser or both are reaching up and away from the ghastly experience of a horrible death and are instead creating something beautiful and poignant to put in its place.

Of her show, Esser herself noted that, “Julia would be much more proud of the fact that I made something good out of this, instead of stifling it.”