Eden Taff

 

ARTIST STATEMENT

The Garden of Grief and Fantasy was the inspiration for Taff’s poem of the same title. The piece explores a woman’s longing fantasy of perfect love after the breakdown of a relationship. An outstretched woman faces the viewer and a man curls away to create a soft V-shaped overlap at the center of similar formations in a heavenly natural scene. This work was also inspired by the word “Eden”—the artist’s name and the religious ideal of harmony.

The Garden of Grief and Fantasy

Your mother bought a new carpet for the new house its clean and red

And we sit cross-legged facing each other sharing a glass of Thanksgiving’s cranberry sangria you drink it mostly because I have the car and I have to to drive home after tonight I swoon because you poured it for us and because Miles Davis plays low over wooden beams and parquet floors and through the thin walls of your bedroom as I bend forward leaning to kiss you hands first I crawl onto your lap and sometimes being new again after so many years of imagining means you lean backward away from my rested head and I have to say nothing.

And I remember that I have a good memory

I have a good memory and that means that I know exactly how it was and I know that I think that how it was is exactly how it’s supposed to be and that means that whatever it is

Now will let me down.

So I must practice acceptance and choose whether or not to wait for you to fall back into stride with me or stop in my tracks and pick up walking from where you are now.

Do I have a good memory or am I very good at making beautiful stories

This I do not know.

The songs are starting to sound like love songs again and do not pull and pull at the bottom of my throat and I don’t cry so much anymore and I’m starting to feel a little bit of peace but still I am scared because loss and love were the same When You Were Gone but the cold knife of fear slices the skin of certainty when You Tell Me I Have You but I Can’t Touch You.

So I let myself live on in the Garden of Grief and Fantasy where your Ghost sleeps by my side and keeps me warm in my dreams

Where there is a cold river where we can swim if we tread the water hard enough

Where all we have is a bottle of champagne for drink where we run through the rain again where it isn’t Dangerous to Fall So Young because the hills are soft on our backs.

But now I am here and Now I am cold but don’t you worry about me and I am beautiful but don’t you Dare tell me because if you do I might forget.

BIO

Eden Taff (she/her) (b. 2000) is an artist from Washington, DC. She is currently a senior at NYU Gallatin with a concentration in contemporary art theory and taste and a minor in Studio Art. Taff’s work is multidisciplinary and includes oil painting, drawing, and multimedia artwork. She explores the pursuit of “pure emotion,” or the desire to experience powerful feelings such as love, fear, and grief, and somehow manifest these internal sensations and drives in a visual manner. Taff often depicts human bodies in nostalgic or familiar settings to demonstrate both the profound humanity and daunting alienation extreme emotion evokes within the body.