Jennie Beth Banks

  “I Wish I Had, Part II”

Mixed Media Assemblage & Film 

Last year Mikey’s red chair was one of the most talked about pieces in my exhibit. The red chair he gave me about a year before his accidental and ‘unexpected death’. I shared how he had a woodland burial 3 hours from my home in the UK and that myself and mutual friends were unable to attend due to a freak snowstorm and blizzard. Mikey died in 2010. Because I had locked away my grief with all its regrets and Wish I hads, I never made an effort to go see him later. I moved to the US in 2015 and life took over and it recently dawned on me that I hadn’t been there. This year on my annual trip to the UK, I managed to locate Mikey and go and see where he lay now – the site you see in this photo. He loved nature and planes and I even remembered a buried memory of him taking me to this burial site, a former airfield, a few years earlier and saying that’s where I want to be buried. I had thought nothing of it thinking his death was many, many, years in the future. Now I wonder if he knew he was dying. Was his death in fact accidental?

This assemblage reflects the emotional journey of my Re-connection with him by going to this visceral place of his resting bones. 

My Re-visiting our Re-lationship and making it anew:

· We had a ‘spirit’ tea together at the Soul Café in Olympia (with his red chair)

· I then took a shaving of the red chair and sprinkled it on his grave 

· I had tea with him at his burial site

· I took back the wooden necklace he had given me to show him 

again and wore it on me that day. 

· I took the photo of us having tea in Olympia to show him at his grave

· The grasses and flowers – parts of him I picked from the top of his grave and brought back with me to America … grasses and flowers nourished by his bones.

· While at the grave, I filmed the windy day, and Mikey’s presence blowing through my hair. I spontaneously hummed the song ‘Old Langs Syne’ often sung at funerals in Scotland – “Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne?” (For the sake of old times). 

· The empty frames – all the non-memories we never got to create due to his untimely death. Frames that look like the ones in British stately homes as these reflect the historic interests we shared. 

· The frame with no picture – the no-memories we never got to create after his death

· I have only one photo of him and here it accompanies the other necklace he gave me age 19 – all tangled up like his messy death and my messy grief.

· Today we have tea together here. The empty chair may look empty but he is there if you feel it (A tradition Queen Victoria started by always having a seat and table setting for her deceased husband Albert). 

The Re-words – all the words my journeying conveyed … all the words we are capable of enacting at any time when we go back and Re-member our person or Re-form a new Re-lationship with them. at a later time, at any time. 

It is never too late to Re-connect to your person. 

As I assembled this piece, I realized I wasn’t just re-connecting to Mikey, 

I was Re-connecting to those parts of me that were alive when in his presence. The life he taught me to live. 

 Artist Bio

Originally from Sheffield in the north of the UK, Jennie currently lives in Olympia, WA, with her two beloved rescue dogs, Mun'i and Xena. She is the Creative Director and Founder of Death Dancer and likes to refer to herself as a Soul Doula, helping and supporting people with their end of life experiences and reflections. 

Death Dancer was born not long after she experienced carbon monoxide and gas poisoning, along with B6 Toxicity in 2021. She thought she was dying several times, which led her to reflect deeply on her own mortality and the inevitability of death. Two years into her recovery, she started working on a documentary idea and began interviewing Death Professionals to help her process her own death anxiety.  

Inspired by this reflective process, she then went on to create conceptual mixed media art pieces related to Death & Dying, Loss, and Living, which led to the curation of an art exhibit for the Fall Olympia Arts Walk in October 2024. Her art practice has developed ever since and more and more ideas keep flowing to help us open up the conversation around death and dying and grief. 

www.deathdancer.org