Welcome to the Arvon Project, Grieving the Artist. This year, I moved into my dad’s artist studio, and I set about the task of making room for myself, my partner, and my dad’s artwork in the same small space. It was important to me not to rush the process of sorting through his artwork and other possessions, as I knew myself and my family weren’t quite ready to deal with so much stuff. I also wanted to be able to really look at everything, and catelogue it before we made any decisions. Another important aspect for me was making sure that my mum didn’t have to deal with so much of it; her loss was an everyday loss, her whole life had changed, so I knew having someone there to help her was extremely important.

The first goal for me was to protect the works, and this job has a time constraint due to the climate of the space and how they were initially stored. Many of the works were stored in a temporary manner; it was clear that my dad expected to move them, so they weren’t kept in a space with long-term preservation in mind. As my dad became more ill, tasks like preventing damp in the flat got neglected. Therefore, it was paramount that I deal with any damp issues and store the painting more appropriately for long-term storage.

I came up with the idea for this project when I realised just how daunting a task this is for someone who is grieving for the person who made these pieces of work. Whilst feeling particularly overwhelmed, I went looking for people’s experiences online of how they dealt with this scenario. I noticed in my searches that there was a severe lack of online resources for people going through this type of circumstance. The main focus of the results on Google, etc, was on artists making art to process their grief. Therefore, I decided to share my journey of dealing with what to do with my dad’s artwork, to share ideas on how to store and care for the work. And along the way, hopefully, we can all feel better supported in dealing with big tasks like this whilst grieving.