Grieve Online Gallery
Grief isolates. Storytelling brings people back into connection.
Each year, writers and storytellers across the country take part in the Grieve Project. We welcome many artistic forms such as prose, poetry, film, audio, graphic storytelling, and visual art. The range of creative expression makes the conversation about grief and loss more accessible to everyone.
Below are the works selected by our Curators to be showcased this year.
Mixed Media Award-Winners
‘Everdearest Brit’
Photograph
Artist: Angharad Lodwick
Winner of the Newcastle Memorial Park Award
Artist Statement:
My friend Britt Lapthorne died under suspicious circumstances while backpacking in Croatia in 2008. Her case remains unsolved. When I found a collection of her letters from high school, I was inspired to respond with a handwritten letter reflecting on how the world has and hasn’t changed.
Mixed Media Selected Works
‘End. Of. Story.’
Video
Artist: Sarah Baker
Artist Statement:
Throughout history, the status of “great artist” has also functioned as camouflage, shielding predators and invalidating victims’ grief. Separating art from the artist protects abusers. Rescinding their place in the canon makes space for the marginalised. The damaged portrait of bushranger Ben Hall is a metaphor for faults hidden in plain sight.
‘Sam Mandalas’
Video
Artist: Kathryn Latimer
Artist Statement:
My Mandalas are an ephemeral offering to my son Sam, whose spirit urged me to shake off the darkness and pick up a stick. Representing the impermanence of life, and the letting go of what we can no longer hold, I leave my grief for the tide.
‘Golden Girl’
Audio
Artist: Lucie Thorne
Artist Statement:
‘Golden Girl’ was written in tribute to my dear friend and magnificent songwriter, the late great Sara Tindley.
Credits:
Lucie Thorne: vocals + baritone guitar
Hamish Stuart: drums
Alice Williams: harmony vocals
‘Without It’
Audio
Artist: Tilley & Daniel J Townsend
Artist Statement:
Daniel coached me through the co-write for ‘Without It’ during a creative development residency for my Living Grief Project. Some inspiration came from Weller’s ‘Gates of Grief’. The rest was emergent. What I love about this song is how it just… lets it all be exactly what it is.
Gallery
To view the gallery of selected works, please click on the image.
Artist Statements
Lynsey Lew: Mum’s death in hospital was horrific. The healing vigil allowed in the nature she loved so much. From the garden she nurtured, just as she had nurtured me, my brother, my daughter. She was returning to nature soon, and the beauty of nature matched the beauty of her love.
Anthony Sevil: I am an exhibiting sculptor who works with found objects. For my sculpture, ‘Solace’, I used a ladle and spoon to express a supporting connection between two people. It can also symbolise the comfort of food. I lost a son to bowel cancer. He was thirty.
Danielle Creenaune: This book delves into the intimate connections between letter writing, loss, absence, and the enduring love of nature and gardening. Through hand-written letters from my father over 20 years along with my own lithographic imagery, it reflects how letters become vessels of memory, a way to bridge distances created by loss and grief.
Fiona McDoanld: Grief—as a sculptural narrative of memory within time.
Discs of black stoneware and felted wool represent slices of time and remembering.
Representing these states in physical form encourages reconnection between the physical and the remembered, enabling us to reconsider story, memory and emotion from multiple viewpoints at different times.
Natalie Kikken: ‘Body of Tears’ captures the intense grief and heartbreak of losing someone—still alive—but no longer part of the future. The image also denotes the death of the photographer’s parent, and furry friend. The water literally collected the photographer’s falling tears as the photo was taken.
Photozine
‘How to Carry Grief’
Artist: Sarah Baker:
Artist Statement: I gave my grief bodies to bear—two small chairs, carried throughout the year. They became the embodiment of absence and companions in my mourning.
Artwork Series
‘Spilling my father’s guts 1-5’
Artist: Beth Yahp
Artist Statement: These collages were made in 2025 when my father’s Alzheimer’s disease had progressed to the point where he was non-communicative and mostly non-responsive, with moments of lucidity interspersed with paranoia or silence. They were made from his passport photo and other family photos and a painting of him as a child. With the progression of his disease, it seemed like many things spilled out of my father’s head: his personality, his curiosity and sense of adventure, and his memory, including of us, his family, and my mother, who was the love of his life. My father was a child during the Second World War in Malaysia and was always hungry. He continued this trait into his old age, defying his doctors, and his family, who were always trying to control what he could eat. In making these collages I was grieving the father we had lost: the hungry, hardworking father who always took us in search of delicious food; who for many years now had been entrenched in depression; who was once the hopeful eleven year old boy I had painted one school break using his old black-and-white photo and too much yellow; who toiled selling fertilizers in palm oil plantations and rubber estates to put food on our table; who no longer remembered my mother except as ‘that Thai girl’; who under his usually serious demeanour had once been prone to ‘playing the fool’ and making everyone, especially us, laugh. In Traditional Chinese Medicine the gut is the body’s ‘second brain’ and these images attempt to capture the feeling of being with him, watching that brain spilling away.
Grieve - Volume 13
The accompanying 2026 Grieve Anthology captures the diverse voices and experiences of grief and loss. The anthology presents the longlisted works from the 2026 competition and is available from the Hunter Writers’ Centre website.
Thank you to our sponsors
Foundation Partner
Project Partner
Project Sponsors
