How to Look After a Grieving Elephant (and other social animals)
Welcome animal investigators!
How to Look After a Grieving Elephant (and other social animals) is a participatory art project, created with young people, which explores how some social animals grieve.
Did you know that lots of social animals change their behaviour when an animal close to them dies? It’s not just humans! Some animals hug, some become quiet and some have even been seen to have burials. Several scientists believe that this can be a sign of animals grieving.
Over a series of art workshops, games and crafts, our investigators learned about the grief behaviour of social animals. Armed with notebooks, safari hats, and their own imagination, they created hot tips on how to look after grieving elephants, monkeys, wolves, whales, giraffes, and crows, and perhaps how we can look after ourselves as humans too.
Grief Helpline for Social Animals:
Listen to the Grief Helpline for Social Animals, written and recorded with young people in St Helens.
The telephone will be touring to various public spaces in St Helens from December 2024, launched at Willowbrook Hospice Living Well Centre.
You can also listen online: at Heart of Glass (coming soon).
Participatory workshops:
Over a series of 7 sessions in summer 2024, our animal investigators created elephant masks which chomped on helpful suggestion leaves, we made a pocket hug felt monkey, paper cup telephones for howling wolves, salt jars for sensory whales, painted pebbles for giraffe memorials and decorated a crows picnic basket full of all of our items, and a self care collection – ready to open if we ever need help with our own grief.
We used our learning to make the Grief Helpline for Social Animals!
Project designed by Jenny Gaskell.
The helpline was scripted with the young animal investigators participants: a collection of children in St Helens who have experienced bereavement.
Recorded with: Young Wonders
Audio Production: Serafin Dinges, featuring the song Poppyseed by Podington Bear
Photography: Layla Sailor
Produced by Wonder Arts and Heart of Glass, with Willowbrook Hospice and Child Bereavement UK. Supported by Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programme and National Lottery Community Fund.
