Day: 1 August 2025

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.