The Materiality of Mourning: Abstracts (in programme order)
Session One: Objects as Embodiments of Emotion
Su Chard (Independent Funeral Celebrant)
‘When the mantelpiece spoke’
As an independent celebrant I spend my working life listening to peoples stories and drinking tea. I am often sat in the deceased’sfavourite chair. The tea is always abundant but the stories are often harder to come by. I will speak of how I use the objects in the deceased’s home to help the family retell the stories of the dead and go on to build a funeral rite that has the deceased person at its centre. I will explain how these objects then become part of the funeral rite itself and often then become modern grave or cremated goods. I will offer three case studies and explain how for one family, the mantelpiece spoke.
From the realisation that I am often offered the deceased chair, as it’s the only onefree, came the idea of the installation “The Empty Chair”. It speaks of the arc we make in life, striding tall through our lives until we are only able to sit and then eventually lie. It considers the “little world” of those confined to a chair in their last months. This will be available to view.
David Nash, Bucks Heathcare NHS Trust, Bereavement Support Lead.
David will share his experiences of counselling bereaved family members in the work of Bucks Healthcare NHS Trust.
Pam Foley (Artist)
‘Routes of Sorrow’
Pam Foley’s artwork,Routes of Sorrow, emerged from a time of grief. Finding a lack of visual responses when searching for solace, Pam found consolation from making things. Designed as an ongoing art project, she produces artwork concerned with the topics of chronic sorrow and inherited sorrow, and then offers it as a stimulus for others to delve into their own difficult personal circumstances. This is done in partnership with care professionals who expertly guide their clients, referencing the artwork, through a process of questioning within a safe and nurturing environment. Two powerful symbols, a bird with a broken wing and dried rose petals, act as conduits into this journey. The aim of the artwork and project is to find ‘ways in’ to a contemporary discussion about grief, sorrow and loss, through curiosity and conversation, for those who would not normally engage in art activities.
Charlotte Goldthorpe (Huddersfield)
‘Can an Artefact be Created to Store the Memory of Lost Love’
My practice focuses on the traverse between contemporary art and design, looking at creating artefacts to store memories of lost love. I collect memories from people relating to platonic, familial and romantic relationships that they have experienced, which then inform the development of sculptural artefacts, created to capture and embody this lost love.
My research explores how the most mundane object can become a shrine or reliquary for the emotions and feelings of another, which could be further developed as aids to provoke memories for those with dementia or helping the bereaved to process grief in a visual and tactile way. Exploration of personal objects prompts memories of lost love. It is the storage of these memories that I am interested in creating.
I have started to collect narratives at “lost love cafes” which I have established in local coffee houses where people donate their memories of times spent and objects associated with lost loved ones. From these collected memories I hope to look further into love and all its different facets, which in turn will be used for the production of new artefacts that will become storage sculptures for memories and feelings felt for lost love.
Eric Venbrux (Centre for Thanatology, Radboud University)
‘Destroying objects, keeping memories:Ritual destruction of the personal belongings of the deceased and the process of mourning among the Tiwi of North Australia’
Material objects that belonged to a loved one can be deeply invested with emotions. Fights over an inheritance are a matter of course in European societies. Not so among the Tiwi Aborigines from Melville and Bathurst Islands in Australia. The Tiwi have a radically different attitude toward the personal belongings of the deceased. The close relatives of the dead consider a continued presence of these things simply too painful. The objects are not kept as mementos but destroyed. Ritual workers have the task to get rid of them. In both cases, however, the personal effects are given special treatment and help to construct a new relationship between the living and the dead.
The destruction of personal belongings, along with an objectification of immaterial memories, serves to constitute the spirit of the dead. Tiwi people do away with a dead person’s objects because these strong reminders cause them too much grief, but not everything needs to be destroyed at once: selected objects may be saved and employed as beneficial aids to the process of mourning in the final mortuary rites, taking place months after a death. Then also these objects are destroyed, while the evoked memories of the deceased last.
Lucie Whitmore (University of Glasgow)
‘“A matter of individual opinion and feeling”: The changing culture of mourning dress in the First World War’
Mourning dress – the typically black costume traditionally worn after the death of a relative – was primarily designed as a semiotic object: it transmitted a message to the world that the wearer was recently bereaved and in an altered emotional state. This paper explores the changing culture of mourning dress during the First World War, a period in which mourning dress evolved both semiotically and materially to suit the emerging ‘army’ of young widows, a generation that experienced a seismic – if not lasting – shift in women’s public persona. For some mourning was a burden and a crippling expense, for others, a significant stage in the grieving process and a personal act of remembrance when there was no body to grieve, and no chance to say goodbye. Using the evidence of mourning in contemporary magazines as well as the few material remains that survive in museum collections, this paper will argue that the ensuing ‘breakdown’ in mourning dress culture can be attributed to the diverse emotional needs and social expectations of bereaved British women; non-combatants; who are so often excluded from the historiography of that war.
Valerie Hope (Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies, Open University)
‘Dressing for death: Roman mourners, memory and clothing’
This paper investigates the role of clothing in Roman funeral ritual, mourning and memory construction. Recent research and archaeological investigation have thrown new light on the textiles worn by the dead and placed in the grave, while tomb images generally show the dead as in life, with clothing which indicates status and identity. But what were the differences between the clothes of life and the clothes of death, for both the dead and the living? What happened to a dead person’s clothes? And how was a Roman mourner supposed to dress? I will explore how bodies, living and dead, were dressed for death: the dark, dirty and dishevelled appearance of the Roman mourner, which stood in opposition to the washed, perfumed and neat corpse. The clothes of both the corpse and the bereaved, were more than just bodily coverings, but objects that were viewed, touched and smelled, and could be destroyed or preserved. Dress was symbolic of loss and grief, and individual items of clothing could be imbued with emotion and memories. Clothes and textiles could serve as mementos of the dead, and as mementos of mourning.
Helen Ackers (Classics, Oxford University)
‘The face of the deceased: portrait busts in Roman tombs’
The aim of this paper is to understand the role of the portrait bust in Roman practices of mourning. The freestanding Roman portrait bust was represented extensively in tomb contexts. Despite the loss of provenance of many busts, good examples of busts from funerary contexts survive: from the well-known Roman examples of busts displayed in the niches of the VignaCodini Columbarium II and the Manilii family tomb on the Via Appia to the RömergrabWeiden in Cologne. Portrait busts were displayed in tombs throughout the Imperial period and all over the Roman Empire. Even in funerary contexts where lack of space or resources precluded the ‘real’ thing, the form of the bust was utilized. This is reflected in the large corpus of funerary reliefs and sarcophagi which depict portraits in bust format.
This evidence reveals how important the bust format was to Roman practices of commemorating the deceased. In this paper I will investigate how the bust was utilized within specific family tomb contexts in an attempt to unpack the societal function they played in the Roman mourning process.
Sara Piccolo Paci (Visiting Professor, Fashion Institute of Technology, Florence)
‘The Mask of Death: Death Masks and the “Image” of the Dead in Florence, from Renaissance to Modern Time’
One of the most controversial artist of his time, Filippo Brunelleschi, the artist/engineer of the Florentine Dome, and the “magnificent” Lorenzo, who brought Florence at the pinnacle of its expansion and beauty, had their face recorded in plaster immediately after their death, as a sign of honor, thanks, grief and memory. Their facial impressions have later been multiplied whenever the example of their “genius” was honored and remembered, as expressions of human’s skills and capacities. But not only great artists or politicians had their face remembered. The Church of Santa Croce, as well as the English Cemetery and the Cemetery of the Porte Sante are rich in monuments and sepulchral effigies that honor Florentine glories as well as common people. From Renaissance to modern times, through dead’s portraits and dead’s memories scattered all around Florence, we will analyze the importance of individual features as part of private and public recognisement: from symbols of political engagement or artistic greatness, to symbols of spiritual heights and of private and individual love and affection.
Session Two: Materiality, collecting and display
Michael Brennan (Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Hope University, Liverpool)
‘Why Materiality (Still) Matters’
Much is routinely made about the anticipated obsolescence of material culture, soon to be supplanted by digital practices in a post-materialist future. In practices of mourning, whether public, private or in the space opened up in between, there appears, however, a continued human impulse toward materiality, though in ways increasingly supplemented and mediated by virtual practices of the self.
Materiality is felt most keenly in death and mourning, perhaps precisely because it is the body that provides the locus of human relationships, recoverable only in memory and the material objects left behind that come to embody a sense of what or who we have lost. Materiality in death and mourning, moreover, is experienced as both necessity and dilemma: felt most acutely in the need to recover the physical remains of the dead so that mourning can proceed, while generating feelings of anxiety and ambivalence at the thought of what to do with a loved one’s material possessions. Such ambivalence, and the desire to simultaneously cling to but also relinquish material objects as painful reminders of loss, reveals the productive tensions in mourning.
The material practices of mourning, in all their various guises, are I want to suggest here, attempts not only at meaning-making but at symbolic communication. In the first decades of the 21st century, what we see is not a mourning of materiality but the continued revival of mourning and materiality.
Nick Blackburn (Psychotherapist)
‘Hoarder or Collector? On Grief and Status’
This paper brings together first-hand clinical encounters with those, often bereaved in one way or another, who find themselves troubled by an inability to let go of objects, with a return to the great collections of "curiosities" of the renaissance and beyond: the wunder- or kunstkammer. It explores questions of how social status, class and economics negotiate the identity of a possession between "dead weight" and curio or objet trouvée. Can an aristocrat "hoard"; can a collector live in housing provided by the state?
The paper moves from contemporary to early modern England: a landscape which displays itself to modern readers as peculiarly awash with grief and memory, and one which the academy has also perhaps displayed a tendency to hoard. On the theoretical side, it revists the practices of Cultural Materialism in the field of literature and the Object Relations school in psychoanalysis, asking what the authorities we collect (Margreta de Grazia, Peter Stallybrass, Donald Winnicott) might tell us about our own need to salvage something from what is lost.
Kate Beats (Cambridge Archaeological Unit)
‘Enduring Grief: Images of Mourning from Fifth-Century Athens to Eighteenth-Century Britain’
Twice during the fifth-century B.C Athenian builders disturbed a long disused tomb. Construction stopped and offerings were left for the long dead. One type of offering – a white-ground lekythos – showed images of graves alien to the tomb's inhabitants and recently restricted in use by law. The Athenians were honouring the dead through objects that embodied the rituals of their recent past. Moving ahead 2,000 years, images of the distant past were being used to evoke the grief of the present in eighteenth-century British neo-classical style.
This paper intends to explore both the funerary iconography of fifth-century Athens and its translation into mourning imagery of eighteenth-century Britain. Discussion will focus on Athenian white-ground lekythoi and Jasperware produced by the Wedgwood Factory. Wedgwood re-interpreted their canonical imagery, which influenced the Athenian pottery he studied. This paper asks why such images of grief are so enduring and what changes were made during their transmission into the eighteenth-century. Why did the British bereaved choose stylised images of the ancient past? By focusing on ceramic art, this paper intends to explore the expression of grief in two highly significant centuries which saw the rise of Western Democracy and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Session Three: Death rituals, burial and emotion
Douglas Davies (Professor of the Study of Religion, Durham)
‘Grave and hopeful emotions’
This paper will consider some of my previous research on attitudes to the potential re-use of traditional cemetery graves, on graves in woodland burial, and on emotions in relation to mourning, all framed by themes on memory and identity drawn from myMors Britannica: Lifestyle and death-style in Britain Today(2015: OUP).
Ruth E. Toulson (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Maryland Institute College of Art)
‘Grave goods: materiality and mourning in a chinese society’
In land-scarce Singapore, the government has ordered the destruction of every cemetery but one. In any context, to raze the grave of a loved one would likely horrify but here the act is all the more terrifying: many Singaporean Chinese families believe that all good things—health, wealth, and fertility—stem from the fact that the dead are appropriately buried. In this paper, I focus particularly on the objects—fragments of bone, chips of gravestone, and splinters of casket wood—recovered from graves. Exhumations are marked by a near obsessive focus on recovering every fragment. However, once retrieved, the objects act as a conduit for nightmares, and visions, channeling misfortune into the home. Such objects can be neither kept nor disposed of. They remain troubling and unsatisfactory, precisely because the fragments can never stand synecdoche, the parts never equal to all that is lost. The paper, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, raises wider questions: how do societies which once structured mourning around the buried corpse deal with the destruction of cemeteries? And what other forms of materiality emerge to take the place of a grave?
Anne Kjærsgaard (Centre for Thanatology, Radboud University)
‘“Why am I talking to a grey stone”: The life and death of gravestones in contemporary Denmark’
Inscriptions and images on gravestones are often seen as valuable sources by historians forming “an archive fashioned in stone and bronze” (Hamscher 2003:40). Though a lot can be learned about past sentiments and relations between the living and the dead from in this way reading gravestones like flat papers, I show that it is equally important to focus on how gravestones are used as material objects in the process of grieving. I thus give examples of how gravestones in Denmark are in fact often touched, kissed, fed, bathed, photographed, given gifts and talked to. Through these practices the gravestones are animated with life and become substitutes for the body of the dead, I argue. I further show how this is also visible at the end of the lifecycle of gravestones when they are treated and reacted to in some of the same ways as corpses are. Gravestones in other words do not only represent the dead (like e.g. historians’ use of gravestones as sources in general holds it); for the bereaved the gravestone can also become identical with the dead. These practices are however at odds with both religious and modernist convictions about the proper relations between the living and the dead that have shaped normative patterns of grieving in Denmark and therefore these practices tend to be kept private.