Divorce: a visual essay

This visual essay incorporates poetry and paintings, telling a narrative about the stages of divorce that Andrea (retrospectively) experienced. The stages developed through this project were not lived as such, but rather are an analysis of past lived experience. The paintings, which were produced in 2011 embed poems that were written around the year 2000 during an ethnographic study on identity construction (Norris, 2011) in which Andrea was one of the participants. Back then, the researcher used poetry to jot down emotions of participants and other difficult-to-describe aspects encountered during ethnographic fieldwork. This year, we revisited the poems that came about because of Andrea’s divorce at the time, and illustrate our findings in this essay.