There are more than 5 stages of Grief
There are more than 5 stages of Grief explores my own disenfranchised grief as an adopted person.
Grief, Stages of Grief, Ambiguous Loss, Disenfranchised grief, adoption, adoptee, adopted person, adult adoptee, watercolor, collage, Nicole Rademacher, artist Nicole Rademacher
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There are more than 5 stages of Grief

Small watercolor and collage work with a torn fragment of printed text near the upper right and a dark painted droplet below.

2017
Series of nine watercolor and collage on paper
approx. 5 × 7 in. each

There are more than 5 stages of Grief is a series of works on paper (watercolor and collage, approx. 5 × 7 in. each) examining my own disenfranchised grief as an adopted person.

 

Each sheet holds two things on a largely empty ground: a small human silhouette cut from magazine text on genetics, ancestry, and inherited illness, with the type still readable across the body, and a poured gray-black wash that runs the height of the page and off its edge. Their relation changes from sheet to sheet. The wash looms over the figure, drips from its head, passes down through it, or has nothing to do with it at all. Scale shifts. Nothing is centered. Most of each page stays blank.

 

The title pushes against the popular use of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages as a universal sequence; her model described people confronting their own terminal illness, not a fixed map for bereavement. The work begins instead from ambiguous loss: a separation that is real but lacks clear closure, recognition, or a socially sanctioned way to grieve. In adoption, an originating loss can be publicly narrated as a gain, leaving grief deferred, unsupported, or difficult to name.

 

Rather than propose another sequence, the work treats grief as recurrent and nonlinear: something that can return differently as knowledge, relationships, and access change.

Exhibited: Impressions: Art by Art Therapists, curated by Melly Trochez, Avenue 50 Studio, Los Angeles, 2019.

Small watercolor and collage work with a long vertical gray wash meeting a narrow torn fragment of printed text.
Small watercolor and collage work with a long irregular gray vertical line and a torn fragment of printed text at lower right.