I was delighted to be in conversation recently with Rebecca Helman about the Relating Suicide book. Rebecca is part of the Suicide Cultures team at Edinburgh University, a five-year project funded by a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award. The project focuses on the social and cultural contexts of suicide in Scotland, and it has a deep commitment to working with lived experiences of suicide and suicidality.
My conversation with Rebecca began by reflecting on the trajectory of my work and how I came to write a book on suicide. We reflected on the writing of the book during the Covid-19 pandemic, and what impression this left on the work. We then moved on to think about what creativity means in relation to the book and the ways in which its form bridges the critical and the creative. We considered the importance of capturing feeling as well as facts in relation to suicide, which formed an important link between the book and the Suicide Cultures project.
We then focused on the book more specifically. We talked about the structuring of the chapters around a series of questions, and the limits of what we can know in relation to suicide. We thought about the emphasis that I put on the importance of place in connection to suicide-related grief, and about the language of living beside suicide.
Our conversation closed by thinking about the archive, reflecting on the ways in which my book disrupts institutional archives relating to suicide and is suggestive of more creative archiving practices. Rebecca shared the project’s making of a photographic archive, based on images contributed by those affected by suicide. We ended by registering the importance of listening as well as speaking in the context of suicide narratives.
Film still, Where We Will Go (2023) by Kate Sweeney
To mark Baby Loss Awareness Week (9-15 October), I am posting the text of a talk I recently gave at a half-day event focusing on sensitive subjects. Organized by Olivia Turner at Newcastle University, the workshop explored ethics and sensitive subject matters in creative practice.
Working with Lived Experience of Losing a Baby from a Multiple Pregnancy
The film Where We Will Go emerged out of a year-long practice of engagement with two families who had lost one twin from a multiple pregnancy at or before birth. The project team was me, Judith Rankin from the Faculty of Medicine, Nicholas Embleton from the Neonatal intensive Care Unit at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, and the charity Tiny Lives. We commissioned artist-researcher Kate Sweeney as the creative practitioner on the project.
The first phase of the project worked individually with parents, and Kate invited them to go on a ‘memory walk’ in a place that was meaningful for them and gather materials from which inks would be made. These inks were then given back to the parents, and the families drew and wrote with them – Kate has animated these images in the film, alongside footage of the places the parents went. In the project’s second phase the parents were brought together for the making of the film. Attention turned to the text of the film, which Kate compiled from conversations with the parents, as well as to the sound recording of the voices, and reviewing edits of the film together.
In this presentation, I focus on two aspects of the project that resonate with the theme of sensitive subjects. First, I think about the practice of working with a lived experience that the parents still sometimes struggled to think about. Secondly, I reflect on the importance to the film not of twinning but of triangulation.
First, then, the practice of representing a subject that was profoundly sensitive to the parents who participated in the project. They wanted the film to represent their experience, both as a resource for other parents and as a vehicle for talking to their children about their missing twin, or sibling, either now or in the future. But they also did not want to make a film that they would find difficult to watch – they wanted parents experiencing this form of loss to watch the film and be comforted by how other parents had navigated it, so that they would have hope. One mother observed: ‘I’d like the film to be able to help others in those initial days, so that they know it does improve. That you can live beside it. We all move together alongside her.’ The process of making the inks sought to base the project in an activity: the parents were doing and could say as little or as much around that as they wished. The activity was slow and structured, and the parents chose to involve their children and their own parents in the gathering of the materials.
What was striking was the extent to which, in talking about the inks and their making, the parents were able to speak of their loss, and perhaps more powerfully so than in addressing the death head on. Kate spoke of the process of making inks as one that held its own poetic vocabulary of grief. For example, the darkening of the ink as the materials react to the mordant is called a saddening. We thought about the inks as infused with the materials and with their associations. The rose inks were made from petals gathered from the rosebush planted in remembrance of the lost twin in her grandparent’s garden and the fragrance of the ink prompted a wish for the baby’s memory to infuse the heart of the person who opened the bottle, the scent meaning that they too could learn her ‘by heart’. Gathered by the twin’s grandparents, the petals were sorted and sent to her parents in the post, the activity a means of familial connection and itself communicative of hopes that they (she) would survive the journey. Describing the act of making a painted butterfly with her eldest daughter, another mother observed: ‘You put it together and see how it’s separated out, with the inks pulling through’. She then described the responses of her two children to the loss of their sister: ‘Her twin brother doesn’t even know what he’s lost. Her sister feels the loss more because she wanted a little sister. But she would have been more left out if she was here.’ The act of separating out and the inks pulling through bleeds into an articulation of how the baby’s memory diffuses differentially through her sibling and co-twin.
The memorialisation of babies lost at or around birth tends toward the metonymic register. The cast of a footprint is powerful because it is a part of the whole, it stands for what is missing. The inks tend more toward the metaphoric register – they enable creativity because they can be infused with any material that holds an association with the loss. The water is a carrier – of the material but also of the associations with which it is invested. In the Buddhist tradition, children who die are ‘mizuko’, which translates as children of the water. The making of the inks resonated with and formalised the mourning rituals in memory of the parents’ own unborn, or born too soon, children.
In making the film, we were aware that at its heart were two twins who had not survived birth. We were working with two families, first one to one and then together. There were two memory walks – one to a beach and one in the hills. The film was structured around twinning of different kinds, and Kate used the split screen of the film to amplify this motif of the double or twin.
Reflecting on the film, I am struck though by the importance of the structure of triangulation. Every session that we held with the parents involved both me and Kate Sweeney as facilitators. For the most part, Kate led the session, and I was in the role of witness, noting down key words and phrases that then formed the basis of the film text. Sometimes I asked for elaboration of a point, or asked questions and gave prompts. I kept my own sketchbook-journal that recorded and reflected on each session in the following days. After each session, Kate and I scheduled half an hour to talk about what had been shared with us and to record some preliminary thoughts.
In terms of process, it seems to me that the triangulation was vital in terms of the sensitivity of the subject matter. It meant that the therapeutic connotations of the one-to-one relation were disrupted. For a form of grief that has not been recognised and that has felt unheard outside of the family group, the witness-function of the third person in the room seemed important to the parents. The sessions offered them a space away from work and family where they could take time to reflect and to create positive new memories in relation to the loss. One parent noted: ‘With a baby to look after, there wasn’t time then to process the loss properly. The sessions provide a mental space and you and Kate are open and listening. There are no interruptions. The memories are so few and the focus is around the funeral. The project is giving us prompts to create new memories and associations.’ The triangulation enabled the project team to hold the difficult memories between and across the sessions and to shape the film in response to them.
What then is to be summed up from these reflections? The main point I want to pull out of these threads is the value of indirection in relation to sensitive subjects, of coming at things at a slant. One the one hand, the process of making and talking about the inks embedded indirection into the project’s process, making them a carrier of meaning, loss and hope. On the other hand, indirection was achieved through embedding into the conversations a witness, who is an explicitly reflective and recording presence. The ethics of the project then lie not only in enabling the parents to speak of this underacknowledged form of grief, but also in enacting and reinforcing the act of listening, so the parents also knew that they had been heard.
Although the weather is still warm, there is a definite feel of autumn when I visit The Angel today. Leaves have started to fall in the copse of trees, and it is noticeably lighter and less shaded than in the summer months, though there is not yet the open, exposed feeling of the winter season. The horse chestnut tree that stands behind the fence marking the western perimeter of the site is dropping conkers and their prickly cases litter the ground.
The copse was planted at the same time as The Angel was erected and it has now grown to maturity. The main planting is of alder trees, and it is around their slender trunks that many of the ribbons and tokens are tied. Alders thrive in wet ground, which strengthens their wood, and they improve soil fertility on former industrial wasteland. This makes the tree an ideal choice for planting at The Angel site, which was formerly used for mining. Rainwater drains from the mound on which The Angel stands, meaning that the path through the copse is often muddy underfoot. Recent rain has made the ground waterlogged today, and I pick my way carefully where the feet of others have already churned the ground.
An alder wood was traditionally known as a carr and was thought to have a mysterious atmosphere, with the green dye from the tree’s flowers believed to colour the clothes of fairies. When the pale wood of the alder is cut, it turns a deep orange as if the tree is bleeding, which caused the alder to be associated with pain. I think of the resonances of the memorial with these traditional beliefs: children often refer to the copse as a fairy garden, and the bark of some of the trees has been incised with the marks of people’s grief.
The tree at the entrance to the copse is an oak, and its acorns are turning from green to brown. The branches of this tree are always filled with tokens and many objects are placed around its base. Today, a gathering of stones of different sizes is placed nearby, although there is nothing to indicate the significance of this memorial. The tree acts as a portal to the copse and is visible from The Angel, which helps explain why it is the focus for so many of the tributes and messages that are left. Like the alder, the oak also has traditional associations with the sacred, and pagan rituals were commonly practised in oak groves.
A plum cherry tree stands nearest The Angel, marking the head of the steep and often-slippery incline that leads out of the copse. In early spring, the tree is a dazzle of white blossom against blue skies. In winter, baubles and wire butterflies hang suspended from its bare branches. I often think of this tree as a sign of hope, associating its flowers with the end of winter and its decorations with the festivities of the Christmas season.
My first visit to The Angel of the North with David took place on a sunny day when the site was busy with families and coach trips. David had brought his audio equipment to test out possibilities for the sound piece and he carried a small recorder, a microphone, and headphones.
Once we reached The Angel, David knocked on each of the welded panels that make up the feet. As we moved round the sculpture, knocking and listening, each panel sounded with a different pitch. We spent some time comparing one panel to another, learning how the sounds varied depending on whether we were at the side of The Angel or were knocking on the heels or toes of the sculpture.
David then put his headphones on and placed the microphone on one of the panels. As he listened to the sounds the microphone picked up, he looked like a doctor with a stethoscope, attending to the internal sounds of the body. He explained that his audio equipment worked in the same way as a stethoscope: the microphone acted as the disc-shaped resonator that is held against the skin and the headphones formed its earpieces.
David invited me to put the headphones on as he held the microphone in place. Putting the headphones over my ears, I heard a low droning hum and was astonished to be able to listen to the ‘voice’ of The Angel as I stood beneath its immense wings. Working slowly round The Angel with the microphone, we heard the same variation in the pitch of the hum that we had picked up with the knocking.
A stethoscope can be used to pick up the sounds made by the heart or the lungs. What noise was David’s microphone enabling us to hear? We could identify vibrations caused by children nearby, who were using The Angel’s toes as a slide. But we weren’t sure if the low drone was the effect of the wind causing The Angel to vibrate or the steady rumble of the motorway traffic as it resonated through the structure. Whatever its source, the sound of The Angel was filled with energy, and it felt like I was listening to the sculpture breathing beside me.
As David made his test recordings, people approached to speak to us, curious about what we were doing. A woman with her children asked what we could hear. David gave the headphones to her daughter, who said that the sound was relaxing, like something you could meditate to. Her son then told us that he would use the sound to compose a piece of music, which he would call ‘The Angel of the North’.
I have always been aware of sound on my visits to The Angel, and in a previous post I described my association of the memorial in the trees with the mingled noise of wind chimes and traffic. Looking back at The Angel from the memorial site, I could hear its lingering hum in my ears, and I knew that, whenever I was there, I would always now listen for that faint echo of The Angel’s breath.
Film still, Where We Will Go (2023) by Kate Sweeney
The Losing a Twin at Birth project film was recently exhibited at the Newcastle Contemporary Art Gallery.
Kate’s film, Where We Will Go, was included in the exhibition Communities and Change, which ran from 3-7 July 2023. Curated by the organising committee of the Memory Studies Association seventh international conference, the exhibition brought together installations by local and international artists exploring the role of memory in communities navigating change.
Other participating artists included the Amber Collective, Henna Askainen, I-Wei Wu, Pablo Martinez Capdevila and Tara Hipwood.
Thanks are extended to Catherine Gilbert and Alison Atkinson-Phillips for their kind invitation to participate.
In February 2023, a book launch for Relating Suicide: A Personal and Critical Perspective was hosted by the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University. It took place in the Birley Room at Hatfield College, and I was both moved and delighted to see the venue filled with so many dear friends and colleagues.
The evening was launched by Professor Angela Woods, Director of the Institute.
Newcastle University Emeritus Professor Linda Anderson then reflected on the book’s combining of creative and critical writing.
My conversation with Durham University Emeritus Professor Patricia Waugh deepened the discussion of creative and critical approaches in the book. We ranged across other topics, including the integration of the personal into academic writing, the value of reticence, the question of form, and the influence of Virginia Woolf.
I closed the launch by reading a short extract from the third chapter of the book, in which I reflect on the tide clock that hangs on the wall of my kitchen.
Thank you to the Durham Institute for organising and hosting the event.
The awards were established to recognise and celebrate great examples of collaboration beyond the university. They showcase teaching and research that brings value to the social, cultural, or economic wellbeing of a place, whether that is the city of Newcastle, the broader region, or across the globe.
Our project was the winner under the category of ‘Engaging for Health, Wellbeing and Societal Benefit.’
We received the award at a ceremony hosted in the Common Room at the Mining Institute in Newcastle. Newcastle University head glassblower Robyn Hare created a beautiful artwork that was presented to us at the ceremony.
We felt honoured to be in the company of such inspiring colleagues, and we are grateful to the parents who participated in the project for their commitment and generosity.
Film still, Where We Will Go (2023) by Kate Sweeney
We conceived of Losing a Twin at Birth as a project that worked with parents to capture their experience of this complex form of grief. Yet the activity of gathering the materials for the inks enabled other family members to be involved.
In my last blog post, I described how the grandparents of one family participated in the project by gathering rose petals from their garden and sending them through the post, so that they could be used to make the inks. In another family, the grandparents took part in the memory walk, which became an occasion to remember and talk about the lost twin. Both families included their children in the memory walks, and they helped to choose which materials were collected.
The sketchbooks Kate provided were used by the parents to record images and thoughts relating to the project. Each of the parents also gave a sketchbook to their children. As the project progressed, we received drawings from them, giving us a glimpse into the sibling perspective on this form of grief. On the memory walk, one co-twin sketched the surrounding hills using ‘ink’ from bilberries collected on the way, and Kate used this drawing for the title image of the film. Another co-twin declared at the end of the memory walk that she had seen a dolphin in the sea, and she drew this in her sketchbook. Kate animated the drawing to end the film.
For the parents, it was important to talk to their children about their lost siblings so that they remained a constant presence in the family. The memory walks extended the ways in which they were already creating memories with their children. One of the parents observed, ‘The memories are so few, and the focus is around the funeral. The project is giving us the prompts to create new memories.’
At the beginning of the project, the parents expressed a wish to help other parents by making the film. During the course of the project, they came to see the film as a document that they could also share with their children, either now or when they are older and want to know more about their siblings who have died. One parent described the film as a way of ‘safeguarding for the future’.
While the parents remained the central focus of the project, it became clear that their grief could not be separated from the effects of the loss on other family members. The parents chose to involve their children and their own parents in the project activities, and the film likewise sought to capture the contribution of different generations to its making.
Film still, Where We Will Go (2023) by Kate Sweeney
For one family who participated in the Losing a Twin at Birth project, roses had taken on a particular significance. They explained, ‘When a new baby is born in our family, we find a rose with a similar name and plant it for them. We give a lot of roses, to everyone.’
These parents wanted to collect rose petals for their inks. Our conversations often returned to the progress of the roses in their garden: ‘Our roses are slow this year, but the garden is full of buttercups.’
In the second session, Kate gathered the materials from the memory walks. The parents brought a sealed zip lock envelope filled with rose petals. These had been collected by the twins’ grandparents, from the rose bushes in their garden. They had carefully rinsed and sorted the petals before posting them to the parents. The parents noted how hard it can be for an older generation to talk about the loss of a baby, observing, ‘My parents were pleased they could do something to contribute.’
When we opened the envelope and spread the petals on the table in front of us, their fragrance filled the air. Kate photographed the parents’ hands, holding the delicate petals cupped in their palms.
In the following session, Kate gave three bottles of rose inks to the parents. She had sorted the petals by colour and the inks ranged in shade, each one paler and more muted than the petals from which it had been made. The parents commented, ‘I like how they have changed, that they are so faint.’ We had already talked about ‘silent inks’, in which the material infuses the water without colouring it. These inks were not silent; they felt like a quiet presence in the room.
At the next session, the parents brought in their sketchbook. On one of the pages, there was a pencil drawing of a rose on the left-hand side and a heart on the right. Petals from the rose were blowing across to the heart. One of the parents explained, ‘I like the idea of somebody smelling the roses and the fragrance going up their noses and into their hearts.’ Kate animated the drawing for the film, assembling the petals from the rose into the shape of a heart.
For this family, roses were used to celebrate births and had also become an important way of remembering the lost twin. They formed a link across the generations and the act of collecting the petals enabled the grandparents to participate in the project. The concentrated fragrance of the petals in the inks evoked a parental wish that those who had not had a chance to know their daughter might still take her into their hearts.
In the first session of the Losing a Twin at Birth project, artist Kate Sweeney handed out sketchbooks to the parents, so that they could use the inks made in the sessions to draw images. I was also offered a sketchbook and I used it to record my thoughts on the sessions with the parents. I found that this way of notetaking enabled me to reflect on the language we had been working with, as well as on the process of ink making itself.
In our introductory sessions with the parents, we shared conversation over a cup of tea. As a way of demonstrating that inks can be made from the most everyday materials, Kate used the teabags to create an ‘ink’ that was brought into the second session and used to experiment with different kinds of mark making. We thought together about how the ink itself constituted an archive of the first session, preserving the tea that each person had chosen, and distilling an essence of our conversation.
Image credit: Anne Whitehead
In my sketchbook entry following the first session, I reflected on the language of infusion to represent both the ink-making process and the methodology of the project. Looking up infusion, I found the following definitions listed.
(1) to steep in liquid (such as water) so as to extract the soluble constituents or principles. This was resonant both with the immersion of the teabag in water to make the tea that we drank together in the session, and Kate’s further steeping of the used teabags to make the inks. The ritual of making the tea framed our conversation, acting as a model for how making the inks from the materials collected by the parents would facilitate our conversations about their experiences of loss.
(2) to cause to be permeated with something that alters, usually for the better. This sense of infusion develops the first meaning to suggest that the act of steeping can also be transformative, producing a change. This represented our shared hope that by making the inks and the film, we would be able to make a positive change.
(3) to inspire or animate. Kate’s film-making process involves the animation of drawings, and this meaning of infusion seemed to anticipate the ways in which she would imbue the parents’ ink drawings with something new, infusing them with a different life and energy.
In the second sessions with the parents, Kate gave them the inks she had made from the teabags. The liquid had darkened to a peaty colour, due to the effect of the materials used to preserve it. Kate explained that this was known in dye making as the ‘saddening’ process. As we explored the materials that the parents had brought in from their memory walks, we talked in greater depth about their experiences of grief, and the sessions felt that they too were infused with a deeper sorrow than our first conversations. My sketchbook page following these sessions reflects on the meanings of ‘to sadden’: (1) ‘to deepen colours by the addition of additives’; (2) ‘to cause to feel sorrow; to become sad’.
In the third session of the project, Kate gave the parents the inks she had made from the materials collected on their memory walks. We then used the inks to draw and write with. Kate drew a butterfly with water and dabbed in the inks, which diffused across the paper to suggest the shape of wings. Our conversations focused on the parents’ hopes for the film. They wanted the film to give comfort to other parents who had experienced the same loss by showing that, although the grief does not go away, it is possible to live beside it as a family.
Image credit: Anne Whitehead
My sketchbook notes following this session reflect on the meanings of diffusion. In science, diffusion refers to the spreading of one substance into another as a result of the random motion of molecules. This was what we had witnessed together, as the ink dispersed through the water on Kate’s drawing to form butterfly wings. By extension, diffusion also refers to the dissemination of knowledge, and this picked up the parents’ desire to circulate their experience to others through the film. As we watched the ink pull through the water, it felt to me that there was something there too of the lost twin’s delicate trace in the lives of the remaining family.
My sketchbook enabled me to think with, rather than about, the creative process that Kate was using to make the inks and film. My notes documented the ways in which aspects of the creative process infused our conversations, meaning that the language of ink making became expressive of the phases of the project itself.
