Mapping Death: A Tablecloth

As part of PhD research at LUCA School of Arts and through a residency at Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Fiona Hallinan is gathering knowledge on treatments and understandings of death and dying in different contexts.

These understandings are gathered through small conversation sessions with individuals, who are asked to respond to the question of how death is treated in their community. The findings are accumulated and visualised and mapped through drawings, diagrams and sketches towards the creation of a tablecloth. The mapping is further contextualised through ongoing discussion of material in the On Death reading group.

In conversation sessions, based at manoeuvre atelier, a collective workspace for hands-on textile practices in Rabot, Ghent, interviewee (Hallinan), translator and responder are engaged in a hands-on task of co-creation, in this case embroidery.

The embroidered tablecloth, a work in process, will be one of a set of tools, practices or devices that give life to Ultimology as a concept for learning. This physical mapping of understandings of death will seek to make ways we can look closely and collectively at other endings.

This project was presented as part of the artistic programme at the September 2022 Public Health Palliative Care Conference in Bruges and as part of Openbare Werken, a programme of participatory art practices organised by the BePart project.