Ellie
Ellie is an artist and performance maker.
She has experienced a number of bereavements, including her mum, her brother and her dad.
She started the Grief Series - a sequence of seven projects involving collaboration with artists in different disciplines - in 2009.
“I suppose I make art for unusual spaces.
You reach people by making art free and putting it where the public can find it. I’m more likely to make art for a car park or a layby on the way to Bradford than for a sparkly gallery.
People might be walking around a park and say, “Oh, what’s that?” “And I say, ‘It’s a museum of memory in a caravan.’”
They can have an interaction on their own terms in a way that feels right to them in that moment. I call them accidental audiences.
We’ve had groups of counselling students show up. We’ve had an audience of palliative care nurses.
Those nurses do things I couldn’t do in a million years. They have resilience that I don’t have.
And yet we’re able to offer each other something in that exchange through a piece of art.
There’s seven projects in The Grief Series because of the seven stage grief model. The Unfair Fair is about anger.
I try to find hooks and aesthetics that feel familiar but also unfamiliar. People know what to expect from a funfair. They know what they’ll see and hear and smell.
What they aren't used to is being asked to navigate anger at the same time.
I have a love/hate relationship with grief models. I don’t want it to be like an Ikea wardrobe: “Follow steps 1-7 and you’ve completed your grief!”
I think of it more like a palette of permission to feel different things.
You might mix them together. You can bring your tears but also your laughter. We try to create a playfulness.
We’re not going to tone police how you remember. It’s all allowed.
“Having the art there as the prompt is really vital. It’s an emotional accessibility ramp into the subject. ”
We tend to think of emotions as being very segmented. For me, they’re not.
The more I’ve lived through grief, ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ have felt less like two separate places.
They’re more like two notes in a chord that get played at the same time.
My happiness is tinged by a bit of sadness and my sadness has way more gratitude to it. There’s more depth.
For the most part, I feel positive about that. More accepting of the mess of it.
Post-war, talking about grief just felt impossible. The scale was beyond words.
So we’ve ended up with black and we’ve ended up with silence.
With The Grief Series, I’ve been trying to reimagine the way we could respond. It’s about colour and conversation and food and warmth and community.
The multi-sensory element is really important. Not just what the audience sees and hears but also smells, taste, touch. Food has been a real constant.
Having the art there as the prompt is really vital. It’s an emotional accessibility ramp into the subject.
I met an adventurer once. He said, “The art of adventure is travelling safely in dangerous places.”
That’s what I want to do with my work. Go to difficult places but make it feel as safe as humanly possible. ”
Find out more about Ellie and The Grief Series by visiting her website .
As told to Faye Dawson.
Written by Laura McDonagh.