Art and grief

Research at the University of Brighton's Centre for Arts and Wellbeing brings practice-led and auto-ethnographic methods to the difficult sets of questions surrounding grief, loss and bereavement.

In some types of traumatic loss, for example, grief can subsume the bereaved and mourning can seem to become a process without end. Research at the university examines grief through creative, embodied encounters, looking to understand the role of traditional rituals and personal acts, and discovering ways in which artists' and writers' practices can contribute both to the individuals' healing process and to discussions surrounding grief in society.

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Dr Jules Findley

Dr Jules Findley has conducted exploratory arts research through the use of clay and paper, creating exhibitions that have been shown internationally in, for example, the International Paper Biennale, new Fengxian Museum, Shanghai, and the Royal College of Art's biannual exhibition 2015, ‘Why Would I Lie?’

She has explored 'complicated grief', bereavement in cases where there is no body and consequently no possibility of closure, particularly where it involves the loss of a child or a young suicide - among the least discussed deaths in the UK.

In Edge of Grief, using ragged and distressed paper, fragment portraiture and 200 4” unfired paper clay figures, Jules Findley created an installation of symbolic fragility, recognising that the repetitive practice of handmaking and sculpting paper might embody and channel the perpetuation of grief. She references the established connection between paper and mourning ceremonies - as when paper offerings are burned at Taoist funerals - and her work develops a platform on which to reflect on the relationship between the materials and the personal experience.

Installation by Jules Findlay, pieces of torn paper cascade from the gallery ceiling, picked out by light from the nearby window

Installation by Dr Jules Findley, Edge of Grief.

Jane Fox

Artist Jane Fox's three-part series of drawings, Wind Drawings, Distance Drawings and Scrub Drawings were drawn together under the title of The Mourning Stone project.

She was drawn to walking in the South Downs chalk landscape after bereavement, carrying a small flint stone picked up on the day of her father’s death. In order to ‘steady’ herself and to explore feelings of loss, she began to ask how artists instinctively use the materials around them to improvise with purpose? Also how a practitioner of a touch-based drawing practice might connect with the landscapes they are in and how this might help articulate grief.

The research process involved using the wind and other natural elements to conjoin performance elements with drawing. Jane Fox emerged with a far deeper understanding of the process, one that went beyond existing social and cultural rituals allocated to mourning. She began to understand a shared agency with the materiality of the chalk down land and a method that used touch and sound to engage and tune into the intangible within a landscape.

Jane Fox has brought this research alongside other work by members of the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing. As well as exhibiting the resulting drawings in Sussex and Norway (2019), she has used the work in collaborative journal, authoring with Duncan Bullen and Philippa Lyon, 'Practice-infused drawing research: 'being present' and "making present"' (2016), and a co-authored book chapter with Jess Moriarty published in Autoethnographies from the Neoliberal Academy: Rewilding, Writing and Resistance in Higher Education (2019).

'Witterings' - a wind drawing by Jane Fox in progress.