Nineteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Installations attempt to emotionally support bereaved individuals. This is through using art both as a form of emotional support therapy and emotional wellbeing to sustain a sense of aliveness and visuals of nature which has healing, therapeutic and restorative effects. Research shows that society can disenfranchise grief and death is a difficult concept to come to terms with. The work is interdisciplinary because it relies on other fields such as: geography (where nature and the landscape influences emotions), sciences such as psychology and neuroscience (how the mind is altered), physics (working with the forces of nature), sociology (working with bereaved individuals), philosophy (questioning life), and architecture (how spaces can be healing). Art plays a role in the enjoyment of beauty, expression, communication, raising questions, carving change, education, greater empathy and finding an understanding and meaning in the outer world that functionally feeds into everyday life; therapeutic for the individual and wider. The work comprises of digital art, interactive art, 3D printing and immersive installation which technology explores, and experimentation is a method to unravel this. Other methods include curiosity, multi-angular, slow-looking and a sense of the poetic. The digital aesthetic involves discussions like concepts of sides in a space, sharpness, resolution, sensitivity and the unseen revealed; to really see, experience and connect to nature. The main implication is that exposure to nature can be relaxing and calming for bereaved individuals to then orient focus on their thoughts and feelings rather than focusing on the loss itself.