 In this panel we will hear from three contemporary artists who are thinking through grief, loss and failed fertility in their work, taking us from deep dark places towards hope and light. Feel free to, yeah, sit down or take, yeah. I'll just introduce all three of you as well as Sophie Williamson who will be doing Q&A afterwards. So Lucy Willow will talk about her work The Last Portrait. Lucy works in sculpture and drawing to create installations that tell stories of loss and grief. At Sea Again 2018 is a memorial artwork video installation depicting the scattering of a son's ashes off the coast of Cornwall in 2016. In 2020 Lucy set up the project Dust which contained a collection of broken artefacts inviting visitors to tell their stories and share experiences of grief through the lens of objects displayed. The Dust of Objects 2022 was presented at the conference Death and Culture for York University. Published work by Lucy includes The Last Portrait in Malady and Mortality, Illness, Disease and Death in Literary and Visual Culture from 2016. Holly Slingsby will present Unheard Songs. Holly is a visual artist working in performance, video and painting. She studied at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford and the Laid School of Art in London. Her visual language reflects a fascination with iconographic traditions drawing on biblical imagery, mythologies and contemporary culture. Much of Holly's recent work seeks to convey the unspoken experience of infertility. Her work has been shown at Turner Contemporary, Margate and various other places across the UK and the world. I'm really looking forward to all the presentations. Up next we'll have Melanie Stidolf who you've heard from as well and who's really responsible for a lot of what is happening today. Melanie will bring to us a new work titled The Next Dawn, The Next Spring. The title of the work is in fact a quote from Barbara Hepworth. Mel is an artist and curator, public programme at Tate St. Ives. She studied at the University of Leeds and the University of British Columbia in Canada. Her work is influenced by experiences of infertility and childlessness, not by choice. She's drawn to rock pools and misusing photographic equipment. Her photo book Endless Reproduction recently featured in The Guardian. The photo series last summer is currently showing at Newland Gallery and the exchange. We might be able to never cross and see them as well. The three presentations will be followed by a conversation and a Q&A with Sophie J. Williamson, who is among other things the initiator and convener of Undead Matter, an ongoing programme focused on the intimacy of being with dying and its dialogue with the geological. So welcome to all of you. Well, thank you very much Mel for inviting me to speak today. I think this is the first time as an artist that I've actually been invited to speak about motherhood. So I'm really delighted to be able to kind of share some thoughts with you about my experience. So I'm going to be talking about focusing on a work that I made called The Last Portrait. The Last Portrait is a photographic image of my son Jack's ashes. Jack died in 2006 at the age of 15 following a fatal road accident. And much of my work since 2006 has been trying to think about that space of grief and that idea that you kind of occupy this space of strange strangeness, which I'll talk about a little bit more. Yes, so not really trying to make sense of or to navigate, but trying to create visual imagery which reflects that experience of not really knowing where you are anymore. And even though you're in a world where everything is familiar, everything is very, very strange at the same time following that kind of really devastating experience. So before I get to The Last Portrait, I'm going to just put my work in context. I'm going to skip through things very, very quickly. I could talk in lots of depth about lots of the images, but I'm happy to pick up on those later during tea or over lunch. So I'm going to race through a little bit. I'm actually going to start with a quote. I've got something that's really clicking here, is it? It's earrings. I can hear it in my head. Right, I'll ignore that. Can you all hear the clicking? Right, anyway, okay. Ignore the clicking. Okay, I'm going to start with a quote which is from Nick Cave, who writes very, very beautifully about grief. I'm sure lots of you are aware of his writings. He does a newsletter called The Red Hand Files, and this is a quote from one of those editions. Metaphor can create a merciful sense of distance from the cruel idea or unspeakable truth and allow it to exist within us as a kind of poetic radiance, as a work of art. And when I read that, it really felt as if it was a kind of very powerfully connected to how I work with imagery. So sometimes there's things in life that are just too difficult to look at head on, and I don't really do that as an artist. I'm much more looking to try and find that place of metaphor of something that's actually incredibly beautiful. I'm looking for imagery that is beautiful, that sort of escapes, that kind of being able to pin down and defined, and a place where I'm quite invisible within the work. And it's a kind of... The idea of cruel beauty is something that I work with very much in work, so it does have this deep sadness to it, but it's actually imagery that I find quite hypnotically beautiful and quite strange sometimes. I haven't made very many works that directly reference Jack, but this was one of them scattering of his hashes off the coast of Cornwall in 2018. And the imagery, I wasn't expecting to get any imagery from that really. I had a very cheap selfie stick and a very, very cheap underwater camera, and I literally just put it under the water. And then the imagery that came from that was this kind of magical, incredibly beautiful image of Jack's ashes that were floating and being carried away by the current. So from that, I made a series of works that I wasn't expecting to make. So the work came from the beautiful imagery rather than me setting out to make a particular work of art. This space is... I've made a lot of work from this particular space. I have a memorial garden in LaMona for Jack, and recently, under the roots of this beautiful, large ashtray, I discovered an ancient well, and it is like an archetypal portal to the underworld. It's just fantastic. So a lot of my work is looking at those kind of the unfathomable depths of dark spaces. So the well space is something that I could then imagine. This darkness went on and on and on, and it never had a kind of ending to it. So it's a metaphor, the well's been a fantastic kind of source of inspiration, really, of the things that you might draw up from this very dark place. I find myself either looking at things really up close under a microscope, so looking at the details of something, or into black holes, or the depths of space, or the depths of the ocean. So I'm kind of going from something that's vast and massive and not really being able to get any sense of to the microscopic. Some of the images that came from the well were drawn in charcoal, and these reference sonography, that kind of scanning an internal womb space and finding imagery that came from that space, sort of an empty darkness with this sort of flickering traces. Ghost-like images that kind of were echoes of past kind of stories, I guess, connected with wombs and mythology. I've spent a lot of time working in dark landscapes, so all my imagery and all my work come from this idea of investigating the dark. This was in Iceland in 2016, and I was there during the winter months, and the weather was so bad I couldn't leave the village that I was staying in, and so I spent my time in an old factory, and I found this landscape under the floor, so it's kind of like looking up very, very closely at dust and things that maybe kind of slip unnoticed. And I made a series of journal creative writing responses to this, and I'm just going to read a very short extract. I found grief and sadness residing here. The rolling hills carrying the stories of all that had been discarded, abandoned. The space whispered its stories. Sometimes it's necessary to be on your hands and knees in order to discover what is forgotten. Grief does that. Its greatness and its beauty is its ability to bring everything tumbling down. In the darkness on the horizon line, I imagine Ophelia floating on her back on a black river of dust. So I use creative writing quite a bit in my work to try and create this sense that I'm discovering something that's very unknown, and I think it's that place, it's looking for that place where I might find or be able to communicate with Jack, but it's all a kind of poetic connection, a poetic, symbolic, metaphorical kind of connection that I guess that I'm keeping that sense of being a muffa alive through that experience of working with imagery. And also work with images that become quite symbolic. So this idea of umbilical cords and umbilical cords in my kind of poetic imagination are this symbolic cord that could reach across the threshold, especially if I'm thinking of the world, across the threshold, into the underworld and deliver messages to the dead. So I'm always looking at where we can have those communications and carry on taking place with the dead, and especially Jack. So I think that feeling that motherhood is something that is always continuing. I'm always looking for my relationship to Jack and as a mother to continue through the work that I make. That looks strange from my angle on here. I put that in, it's an old piece of work now, 2007, that was looked after by Susanna reminding me the tapes here a long time ago. A lot of the ways that I sort of articulate, I've sort of developed a symbolic language using dust and using microscopic imagery that talks about transience, loss, ephemerality and the beauty of that. So I've put that in because I've made a lot of dust carpets over the years. Recent work has become quite performative, so working with this idea rather than my own story of grief and loss, working with the idea of a mourner, as a character, this was really taken from the Irish tradition of keening where women used to be employed to wail at funerals and they were the kind of conduits of a community where the emotion and grief of the community would be channeled through this idea of a mourner. So this kind of idea that a woman is a vessel that can actually channel the grief of the community has started to kind of play out in work, so it's becoming much more about narratives around grief generally rather than my own personal story. This brings me back to Nick Cave's quotes, that idea of finding poetic metaphor to find a way of living with something which is unbearable to live with and so these child hands and the dead bird at Goldfinch are something that this is a piece that I've lived with for a long time and I just love the beauty of it and the sadness at the same time. Which does bring me to Jack's ashes. So this was a photographic portrait that I made of Jack a month after his death in 2006. When I received his ashes, I had an absolute instinct to go and look at them under a microscope and my father's a marine biologist and has a lab in Bath so I was able to go and have a look at his ashes under a microscope and the image that then I received was this and it's difficult to put it into words but it became, even though it's the end of Jack's story, for me it opened up something immediately which came the beginning of a new relationship with Jack and that's one of omnipresence and it felt very kind of full of hope and something that was just kind of incredible and I've had a long time now, 17 years this year of thinking about this image and working with this image and wondering what this image is and thinking about whether this image has a public face or whether it's something very personal but my journey and my exploration of an ongoing relationship with Jack has been very much through this image and recently I've started to read theories about hyper-objects that Timothy Morton was actually mentioned yesterday evening in the talk but I've just been reading amazing book called Hyper-Objects and it is about this idea, he talks about it in terms of global warming where something is so vast that we can't actually comprehend it but it puts you into this kind of space of strange strangeness where we're going about our daily kind of business in the world but yet everything has changed and everything is different and he also talks about black holes as being hyper-objects and I have started to think about this object as a hyper-object in terms of something that opens out a space for me that is incomprehensible but at the same time I can find a relationship with that in that place so it's an image that I've written a book chapter about I've talked about it at conferences I've hidden it away, I haven't shown people I've brought it out it's never really been shown in an exhibition because it doesn't really feel well it hasn't felt that it could be present in an exhibition but it is something that I think enables me to feel that Jack has this omnipresence and my relationship to him isn't connected to that bodily experience of him being present in this world but he's present in a very different way and this image has actually enabled me to live through the experience of grief in many many many different ways and in the early days of grief it gave me an enormous amount of hope and courage and ability to carry on so I think that way of being with images has been massively important to me as an artist even though I don't really address or talk about motherhood in particular within my work it's always there I'm always looking for that place where communication can take place and where that connection can be held in all work but it's in a poetic and metaphorical sense and I think that might be all I have to say