Tom Isaacs
About
Shivah (2022) is a non-narrative body art performance and installation that explores the intersections between death, mourning, mental health and intergenerational trauma through reflections on my family history. My paternal grandparents, Alick and Sue, married in 1949. Alick was subsequently disowned by his Jewish family for marrying a non-Jewish woman. His family sat ‘shivah’, a Jewish ritual of mourning, symbolically declaring him dead to them. Alick had a breakdown in the 1960s and was diagnosed with “manic depression”. He died from a brain haemorrhage in 1967 when my father was sixteen years old. A number of my family members have since struggled with mental health problems, including one who took her own life. Like my grandfather I also live with depression. I wish to spare my son the same fate, if I can. Shivah (2022) engages with this personal history and with the broader themes of mental health, mourning, and intergenerational trauma, through creative engagement with one particular custom from shivah, the covering of mirrors.
Bio
Tom Isaacs is a contemporary artist working primarily in the fields of performance and textile art. His practice engages with ideas of mental health and the human condition, and explores the potential efficacy of art. He draws inspiration from philosophy, psychoanalysis, religious writings and practices, and art history and theory. Tom recently completed a PhD researching the relationship between ritual, psychoanalysis and body art, and how these different streams of thought address the problem of alienation.