Month: August 2025

Together with my friend, colleague, and Luna Arts co-founder Wendy Pye, I’ll be running two creative workshops that open space to talk about death and dying.

Funded by Arts Council England, these sessions are part of our R&D project: Opening Conversations on Mortality Through Creativity.

We’re offering two different workshops — details and booking links are below.
All profits will go directly to St Michael’s Hospice.

Workshop 1: Cloth and Memory Workshop: Reclaiming the Ritual of Shroud
Making 

Sat 20 Sep 2025 11:00 AM – 4:30 PM

St Michael’s Hospice, TN38 0LB

https://www.tickettailor.com/events/lunaarts/1727829

BUY TICKETS – Cloth and Memory Workshop: Reclaiming the Ritual of Shroud Making – St Michaels HospiceShrouds have wrapped our loved ones for thousands of years—simple cloths that offer dignity, care, and connection. Today, as we…www.tickettailor.com

Workshop 2: Where Memories Live: Workshop on Place & Legacy

Sat 4 Oct 2025 11:00 AM – 4:30 PM

St Michael’s Hospice, TN38 0LB

https://www.tickettailor.com/events/lunaarts/1727887

Buy tickets – Where Memories Live: Workshop on Place & Legacy – St Michaels HospiceVisual Artists Dagmara Rudkin & Wendy Pye (Luna Arts), invite you to reflect on the significance of place in your life – wh…www.tickettailor.com

I’m honoured and deeply moved that my shrouds have been named a finalist for the Good Funeral Awards.

This nomination brings hope that more people might be drawn to the quiet tenderness of a shroud, the softness of cloth, the natural cradle of a willow stretcher. A way of care that honours the body, soothes the grief of those left behind, and returns gently to the Earth.

I was deeply honoured to be invited by the Phoenix Art Space curatorial team, Laurence Hill and Lucy Day, to recreate Feministo Collated Sculpture—originally made by pioneering feminist artist Monica Ross. This commission, funded by the Monica Ross Archive, revisits a work that was sadly destroyed in the 1980s, as so many artists’ works are, due to lack of storage.

While I aimed to stay faithful to the original, it felt more important to honour Monica’s creative sensibility: working with found and salvaged materials, garments that speak of domesticity, patriarchy, and women’s lives. I created 16 panels, drilled 440 holes, and used 60 metres of nylon string to assemble them.

Huge thanks to the Phoenix team and to Monica’s family, Alice Ross and Bernard G. Mills, for their support. The exhibition Monica Ross: Unquiet Woman exploring Monica’s practice and legacy runs at Phoenix Art Space until the end of August 2025.

Monica Ross: Unquiet Woman

As part of Luna Arts’ residency at Fabrica and our ACE funded project Opening Conversations on Mortality Through Creativity, Wendy Pye produced the Death Salon. Inspired by eighteenth-century salons, it was a gathering of poets, writers and visual artists exploring how creativity helps us navigate grief.

For the event, Wendy commissioned me to create a soft shroud with quilted wings. Combined with willow stretchers made by Sophia Campbell-Shaw from Woven Farewell, it offered a poetic and gentle alternative to a traditional coffin. As speakers and performers took turns, moving landscapes were projected onto the symbolic body. At the end of the event, the guests were invited to place rosemary as a sign of remembrance. Projection design by Giles Thacker from Shared Space and Light. Images below show some of the artists and writers invited by Wendy, including Erica Buist, Corinna Edwards Colledge , Sybil Al-Mane, Naomi Foyle and Ruth Nation-Toda. The event was hosted by Jess May and Marion Deprez.

As part of an Arts Council England R and D grant to develop Luna Arts, which I co founded with my friend and colleague Wendy Pye, we spent four days in residency at Fabrica in Brighton. We invited a group of artists and academics to join us in running pilot workshops that used creativity to open up conversations about death and dying. Together we designed three different workshops and repeated them with different groups. The feedback we received is now helping shape the next stage of our work with individuals, community groups and hospices.

Wendy and Sybil Al Mane from Flexible Films led thoughtful sessions on Place and Legacy. I collaborated with Dr Jennie Riley on workshops exploring grave goods and shrouds, and Naomi Foyle led powerful creative writing sessions on elegies and grief. We were beautifully supported throughout by funeral celebrants and the co founders of Brighton Coffin Club, Jess May and Gitte Monis.

In All You Can take workshops, which I co facilitated with Dr Jennie Riley, we discussed the emotional properties of objects and cloth . We also designed and created mini shrouds. We also had a very special guest, Lyn Baylis who is a pagan chaplain. Lyn showed us traditional shrouding techniques which she learned from her own mother half a centuary ago.