How art helped Amy navigate her grief
Art has been hugely important as a way of processing grief for Amy Standing, one of the finalyear University of Chichester fine-art students offering their degree show 2022.
The preview is on Thursday, May 26; the exhibition opens the following day and runs through until June 1; weekdays 11am-6pm; weekend 11am-4pm.
The venue is St Michaels, Bognor Regis Campus, University of Chichester, off Felpham Way.
Amy, who was born in Chichester but raised in Cornwall and now lives in Rowlands Castle, said: “My whole final project is based around grief and the death of my grandfather who passed away from Covid in January 2021.
"The whole project is based around him. He was called Robert Standing and lived in Cornwall.
“It was the first death that I had ever experienced and I didn't really know how to approach it. I was confused by the way that westernised culture deals with death.
"Someone takes the body and then they're gone.
"You don't deal with the body. It is sent on to other people to look after. You have the funeral and then that is it and I just feel that that is really, really strange.
“I started looking at the ways that other cultures deal with it.
" I have not come to a decision yet whether they aren't necessarily better but in this country we have been raised not to see a dead person.
If you saw a dead body you would think ‘Oh my God!’ but other cultures see it as a blessing and they really celebrate that body.
“For me the grief is still raw. I speak about it when I can, and there are lots fewer tears now than they were before but I think focusing on this project for the last ten months has helped me tremendously.
“It's a way of focusing on the good parts and focusing on the life that he lived. He was in the Ministry of Defence and he was very stubborn.
"He was always right! And he could speak to anybody. If he cornered you in a pub, then you were done for for hours after that! But he was also very caring and loving.
"He was a wonderful man and he had a long life. I think he was 85.”
The exhibition is the culmination of her degree for Amy, who came back to the area ten years ago. Inevitably, the degree has coincided with tough times for everyone as we have all tried to navigate the pandemic years.
“It has been chaos pretty much! That's the only way to describe it. It has been absolute and utter chaos but I think we coped.”
For everyone, it was simply a question of getting on as best they could.
"You just had to get on flittering around and being where you are told to be whether it's on Zoom or in session, with masks on or masks off. You just had to live from one week to the next, but we managed to get by and I think my final project has been really important to me in terms of coping with grief.”