Mourning Stone

Mourning Stone is a three-part series of drawings: Wind Drawings, Distance Drawings and Scrub Drawings. Drawn to walking in the South Downs chalk landscape after bereavement and, carrying a small flint stone picked up on the day of her father’s death, Fox employed and developed new arts-based strategies both to ‘steady’ herself and to explore feelings of loss. The research became driven to explore the use the materials to improvise and to develop a visceral and touch-based drawing practice to connect with and articulate grief.

The research process involved a phenomenological attention to lived experience through walking and drawing in selected settings, including a theorisation of and collaboration with wind, processes of attrition and accumulation within the landscape, and use of flint, chalk and sound as ‘materials’. It also involved an aspect of performance and a process of developing the reflective practice methodology through dialogue with collaborators.

Identifying a territory beyond existing social and cultural rituals allocated to mourning, the research revealed ways to create unfixed and agile ‘structures’ within which feelings of loss can be identified and focused upon through drawing, performative action and metaphor. An understanding of the importance of a shared agency with the materiality of the chalk downland led to further insights into ‘presence’ and an approach to drawing in which touch and sound are foregrounded as ways to engage and tune into the intangible within a landscape.

The research was exhibited in Norway (2019). Work-in-progress also informed a conference paper (2015) and a collaborative peer-reviewed journal article (2017). Subsequent exhibitions were held in Sussex and a co-authored book chapter produced (2019).