Studio Saudade - working creatively with grief

17/08/2026

I'm proud to have contributed a chapter to this wonderful anthology.

09/02/2024

For Annabel, my sista-crone in honour of our matrilineal lineage

For Annabel, my sista-crone in honour of our matrilineal lineage

11/03/2023

′"Grandma, how do you face pain?”

With your hands, my child. If you do it with your mind, instead of relieving pain, it gets even harder.

With the hands grandma?

Yes, our hands are the antennas of our soul.

If you move them by knitting, cooking, painting, playing or sinking them into the earth, you send care signals to the deepest part of you. And your soul lights up, because you’re paying attention to it.

Then the pain signals will no longer be necessary.

Are hands really that important?

Yes, my daughter, think of babies, they begin to know the world thanks to the touch of their little hands.

If you look at the hands of old people, they tell you more about their life than any other part of the body.

Everything that is made by hand, is said to be made with the soul. Because it’s really like that, the hands and soul are connected.

Think of lovers, when they touch hands, they make love in a sublime way.

My hands, grandma… how long have I not used them like this?

Just move them my dear, start creating with them and everything inside you will move.

The pain will not pass but instead whatever you do with it will become the most beautiful masterpiece.

And it won’t hurt anymore.

Because you’ve been able to transform their essence.

Elena Bernabe
del muro de SanArte

"Abuela, ¿como se afronta el dolor?" Con las manos, cariño. Si lo haces con la mente, en lugar de aliviar el dolor, éste se endur...

06/11/2022

Talking with my friend Margaret, I was reminded of the work done by Joseph E. Furey in the 6 years following the death of his wife Lillian. I've always loved the work, but even more so now and understand the saudade that permeates his experience of making: how his work simultaneously honours, grieves, remembers, celebrates his wife and allows him the space he needs to rebuild his life from - and with - loss.

14/08/2022

‘Tis a fearful thing
to love what death can touch.
A fearful thing
to love, to hope, to dream, to be –
to be,
And oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
And a holy thing,
a holy thing
to love.
For your life has lived in me,
your laugh once lifted me,
your word was gift to me.
To remember this brings painful joy.
‘Tis a human thing, love,
a holy thing, to love
what death has touched

'Tis a Fearful Thing by Yehuda HaLevi, 12th century

14/08/2022

Daniel Regan's - I'll Be Seeing You - is a multidisciplinary artwork that explores how he experienced the first year of loss after the death of his mother, Teena.

I’ll Be Seeing YouI’ll Be Seeing You is a multidisciplinary project exploring the first year of living without my mother, Teena, who died suddenly in February 2019. Our close and yet complicated relationship suddenly became frozen in time, leaving me to explore several creative avenues in an att...

31/07/2022

07/07/2022

This is the most beautiful, raw and honest grief memoir writing I have ever had the honor to read. I highly recommend it. Thank you Debra Gwartney for writing it.

My husband had been sick long enough, a string of years, that I’d begun to think of his diagnosis as a rumor. He was interminably terminally ill. Until he

01/07/2022

For me, the only healthy response to grief is to be wholly in it - wherever that takes me. To fully inhabit it, rather than fight it. Grief has redefined - or at least clarified - the central goal of my life: I am not in pursuit of happiness, I seek authenticity.

Grief is one of those experiences that seems like a black-out to me. To comprehend the magnitude of what death really means—that concept of forever—is so challenging on an intellectual level that p…