To the naked eye, grief is invisible. Though all-consuming, the internal implosion set off by bereavement cannot be seen at a glance. Molly Furey speaks with artist Domino Whisker about the intangibility of grief, and why she chose to memorialise it with an enamel pin.
In Ireland, we like to say “we do death very well”. It’s a source of national pride, a story we tell about ourselves. And it’s true, in many ways. The Irish wake is renowned around the world for epitomising the very best of Irish culture at the worst of times – storytelling, craic, community. But when the dust has settled, the tables cleared, the last frozen lasagne thawed, how good are we with all that follows?
“There’s no wake like an Irish wake, I’ll give the Irish that,” says Dublin-based artist Domino Whisker, “but it all happens so quickly and then there’s this moment where people just stop asking you how you’re doing.”
When Whisker’s father, the artist Charlie Whisker, passed away in 2021, she found the seeming invisibility of her profound loss in day-to-day life jarring. “There were people that I was seeing on the street and I just wanted to scream to them ‘my dad just died!’ – like to the person giving me a parking ticket: ‘my dad just died!’” Whisker explains. “I didn’t want it to be an excuse to get away with murder or anything, I just felt like there needed to be something.”
It is a signal to others – handle with care, I’m fragile right now, please be tender.
Inspired by research into Victorian mourning jewellery, Whisker designed a black pin for herself that read ‘GRIEF’ in gold. “I wear my heart on my sleeve, anything I’m feeling I mark it and I memorialise it, and I wanted to do that with this.” The pin offered her a way to tackle the uncanny intangibility of grief she was experiencing. “It is a signal to others – handle with care, I’m fragile right now, please be tender.” Whisker was amazed when other people wanted to buy one for themselves, and began to consider this unspoken and overlooked need the bereaved have for some kind of physical marker of their loss in the initial throes of grief.
During her Parenthesis exhibition at Gormley’s Art Gallery last month, the artist announced that she would be selling the GRIEF pin through the recently launched online death memorial service, The Solace.
“I’ve followed her for a long time and she was always someone on my radar for some kind of collaboration, whatever form that might have taken,” explains Solace founder Mark Legge. “She’s just a fantastic artist and she speaks to grief very, very well.”
For Legge, Whisker’s pin symbolises The Solace’s mission to create new pathways for dealing with death and loss, whether that is at a functional level when it comes to organising the funeral, or a more emotional one in terms of how you think about memorialising a loved one. Legge was struck after his father passed away by the lack of innovation in the space, not to mention any meaningful effort being made to provide aftercare for the bereaved.
Cultures of death and grief are steeped in tradition, wherever you are in the world. In Ireland, there’s a certain rigmarole that is considered “how things are done” when someone dies. For many, the intensity of the first five days of bereavement can be a helpful distraction. There are jobs to do, decisions to make, hands to shake. But The Solace underlines the possibility that unquestioned traditions can lead to a kind of stasis or incuriosity about alternative modes of moving through grief. The GRIEF pin epitomises the site’s efforts to reset the boundaries of how we think about loss and combat the notion that there is a one-size-fits-all solution to the disorder that comes with it.
I used to worry there was something wrong with me, wondering when am I going to get over this? But the pin has helped me find, not a power in it, but a peace in it.
More than anything, Whisker wants the GRIEF pin to challenge ideas around “getting over” the death of a loved one and for it to help the bereaved grapple with the way in which ordinary life prevails despite the profound change that has ruptured theirs. There can be guilt in getting on with things during the early stages of loss – a sense that such ordinariness shouldn’t be possible. The pin, Whisker hopes, allows people to render their experience visible while figuring out how to keep going. “Grief is a never-ending thing but you’re still going to have to go and live your life – go to the gym, go to the club, go to brunch and laugh with friends or whatever, even if it’s always there.” Whisker sees the pin as a tool in the process of finding that balance.
“I used to worry there was something wrong with me, wondering when am I going to get over this?”, she explains. “But the pin has helped me find, not a power in it, but a peace in it, I suppose.”
For Gabriel Paschal Blake, bass player for The Murder Capital, the pin has been a transformative accessory in handling the loss of his mother. “It’s like a badge of honour”, he explains. “It distills this intense human experience into its most simple but clear form.”
While Blake has built a career as a musician, his father is a funeral director and he grew up helping him as an undertaker. “I’ve been around death and funerals so much and have been able to see the world through that lens,” he explains. “But I feel like I haven’t seen somebody talk about grief in the way that Domino does in her work.”
Blake has been struck by the conversations opened up to him by virtue of wearing his pin. “Pins in general are almost like bumper stickers for yourself,” he explains. “They let people in very quickly. As soon as you see somebody wearing it, you ask ‘oh is that a Domino Whisker?’ and you’re straight into talking about why you’re wearing it.”
This pin is like a badge of honour. It distills this intense human experience into its most simple but clear form.
Grief, they say, is a lonely thing. The connection between one person and another is inimitable and the loss thereof is accordingly unique. Can what Blake describes as this “badge of honour” redress such isolation and connect people through their loss? “I think the pin nods to the larger picture of grief,” Whisker says. “It’s just a part of your everyday life and it ebbs and flows. There are weeks where I don’t think about it and then there are weeks where I’m absolutely crushed by it.”
Far from the precise, contained event that it can be framed as – in the form of anniversaries or other big days that mark a linear passage of time – loss has no defined shape nor timeline. It infiltrates the everyday, alters one’s worldview, becomes a new skin. Much like a pin, it is something worn. Something that threads the lives left in its wake.
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