A Place of Potentiality

• doi:10.4324/9781003629306-13

Creative and Aesthetic Ways of Grief

Acts of making are often turned to as sources of personal meaning-making in complex contexts such as death, bereavement and grief. Design, art and creativity can be ways to create tools for dialogue with the self or wider potentialities of the situation. This chapter draws on my experience as a bereaved daughter and design researcher alongside conversations with two artists and one designer who have made work that offers dialogical openings for them in their own grief or more collective understandings of death and mortality. Within these poetic and aesthetically rich artefacts, there are particular dialogical aspects that this chapter teases out and positions in relation to issues of control, aesthetic materiality and personal change. This chapter evidences how creative acts enable the maker, viewer and in some cases the deceased to be active agents in ways of grief, and the potential value on both hyper-personal as well as collective levels. Creativity can offer uncommon possibilities for newness and dialogue in grief, whether manifest in how post-mortem remains are reimagined, through the fine-grained activity of a making process, in spaces left between things, or in new dialogues found through utilising metadata to reframe experiences of people in photographs.