Shannon Jade Wilson

This multi-media project explores personal and collective grief through the symbolism of hair and trees in Irish mythology. The work centres around a series of delicate prints of hair on clothing, evoking memory, absence, and loss. These are accompanied by photographs of graveyard trees and mythologically significant tree species, overlaid with projected drawings of hair, blurring boundaries between the physical and the ephemeral. The project culminates in a three-minute animation drawn from the diary entries of my grandfather, written in 2017, the year of my grandmother’s passing.

Through layered visuals of handwriting, transforming strands of hair, and mythological motifs such as the banshee, the animation becomes a memorial of the transformation and stages of grief. Weaving together personal narrative and cultural symbolism, The Bleeding Tree invites viewers into an intimate reflection on mourning, memory, and the ways in which loss lives on in landscape, myth, and cultural inheritance.