Grief – A Work in Progress began with a series of workshops devised to expose participants to reflections on how we deal with the experience, or anticipation, of loss and grief. The workshops are a six-week program devised for groups of recently bereaved participants. The two-hour sessions, each centred around a main activity that exposes participants to provocative reflections on grief, enable them to communicate their own experiences in unconventional ways. One session, for example, entitled  “I Remember”, based on Joe Brainard’s classic autobiographical work, I Remember (1970), engages the participants in a writing experiment, eliciting recollections of sorrow, allowing them to remember and to forget. The first set of workshops, held in London, culminated in a performance at the Southbank Centre in April 2017.

The workshops are also now being redesigned in order to engage young people, artists and researchers in a series of interventions and reflections around issues of climate grief and ecoanxiety, which we will be running at universities, art galleries and museums in the UK and Europe from this Summer.

A further series of day-long workshop engagements has been rolled out, designed for patients and their carers, as well as medical and hospice staff. With the support of the Griefmobile, these workshops are now being brought to various on-site locations around the UK: hospitals, GP practices, hospices and museums.

“Our society does not encourage open expressions of grief and can further isolate us when bereavement is already a very lonely place to be. Zoe’s grief workshops directly tackled the social isolation often felt in bereavement by bringing people together in a space where grief was the ‘norm.’ Everyone knew that they had permission to say whatever they needed to. The exercises devised by Zoe managed to give structure and helped initiate the exchange of difficult and painful stories of loss, and memories that feel haunting when losing a loved one. In being brave enough to articulate these thoughts and memories group members turned towards, rather than away from their grief. This process fostered a tolerance of difficult feelings, encouraged emotional processing of traumatic memories, and connected group members with their innate humanness. After all, to live is to feel pain and to grieve intensely is to have loved intensely.” Dr. Kirsten Smith.