MORTALITY BITES:
Creative Community Conversations
Design by LV
In April 2024 we were thrilled to be offered an artist residency at Seventeen Nineteen as part of their Emerging Community Artist programme.
This residency has allowed us to develop our work and reach, as both socially engaged artists, and imaginative community death educators. We've used the residency to create a kind of mortal portal in Sunderland where creative conversations about death are normalised and embraced.
We are currently halfway through our residency and love that the co-created artistic contemplations on death and dying with local people are inspiring us all to live life in more vivid, conscious and meaningful ways. The residency is acting as the ultimate memento mori!
Photo by KV, banner by LV
We launched the residency during Dying Matters Week. The initial community conversations at the launch event explored how people feel about talking about death, dying and grief, and in particular, what they would like to talk about and share with others.
At the launch event we created an open and supportive environment, employing creative, self-directed activities to help people express a loss creatively.
The activities included collaging mini gravestones with a motto for living life, decorating a full-size cardboard coffin, drawing a bucket list, painting a memorial stone, and adding a song to a communal grief play list. We took along our travelling wind phone. We also created a pop-up gallery of eco-coffins for people to explore up close. This immersive approach supported people to have relaxed everyday conversations about death and mortality. The activities were also suitable for families/children as well as adults.
Forty-nine people attended the launch event.
People said they were grateful to have a public opportunity to share personal stories about death and grief and to connect with others in welcoming and informal ways.
In our next blog post about the residency, we'll share and reflect on the specific creative grief projects we've hosted with local organisations.
We're also looking forward to running some drop-in/pop-up sessions at Seventeen Nineteen during July to allow visitors to the venue to see and engage with new creative ideas about confronting and celebrating our collective mortality.
