Simon Bray: Telling Your Grief Story


Simon Bray is a Manchester-based artist and creative producer. He uses photography, audio, installation and text to explore the notions of place, identity and loss. Simon’s Loved&Lost project has been seen by over three million people worldwide and is supported by the book, Loved&Lost – Volume 1.

Simon joins Good Grief for an exclusive interview with Dr Lesel Dawson, a lecturer at the University of Bristol and one of the Festival organisers.

Simon talks about the death of this own father and how that impacted him, and how returning to places reminiscent of the loved one who has died can help bring back sensory memories. Photographing groups of siblings also helped Simon to process his grief for his younger sister, who died of brain cancer in 2018. This exploration culminated in the project, Siblings.

He introduces some of his own artistic and photographic projects including Loved&Lost. This involved retaking well-loved family photographs after one of the key loved ones had died and examined how re-staging a photo can help you face the reality of a person’s death and start to process the loss.

Join us for an interview interspersed with Simon’s beautiful and often moving imagery, and learn how important it is for people to share and to express their own grief stories.

Dr Lesel Dawson is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, specialising in grief, Renaissance literature and the history of the emotions. She’s leading a research project on Creative Grieving and writing a book that explores how art and the imagination can enable the bereaved to express and process their loss.


Facilitators

Simon Bray

Dr Lesel Dawson