Creative Grieving

The aim of this project is to explore the therapeutic potential of creativity, demonstrating the different ways that art and the imagination can enable the bereaved to express and process their loss. The project grows out of Hay and Dawson’s Brigstow funded project, ‘An Empathetic Realisation of Embodied Grief in Fiction Film’ and Good Grief: A Festival of Love and Loss, an online festival funded by the Wellcome Trust. ‘Creative Grieving’ will draw on insights from psychotherapists, bereavement councillors, and art therapists as well as artists, photographers, directors and writers who have turned to creative projects as a means of expressing and processing their grief. The project will have traditional research components and practice-as-research components. The research and creative outputs will be disseminated on the Grief Channel, an online public engagement forum that has been set up following Good Grief Festival.