We will be remembering our Covid lockdown experiences for some time yet! In such reflections on how we experienced “the greatest confinement in history” (Crawford & Crawford, 2021), we may well have engaged in creative practices such as writing, drawing, photography, painting and so on to capture these.

Most recently, the National Memorial Arboretum (NMA), the UK’s leading civilian and military remembrance institution at Alrewas, Staffordshire, offered a welcome opportunity for five groups of people to explore their memories through a project called  Lockdown Landscapes, produced in collaboration with the National Forest Company, Westminster Abbey, and Sampad, supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund. I was privileged to advise the project from a mental health and wellbeing perspective, not least in relation to the value of creative practices to express lived experiences and to support people in adjustment to these.

The project explored the impact of local outdoor environments and resources during the pandemic, utilising creative, arts-based activities. The resulting work features a newly designed ‘Lockdown Landscape’ and exhibition at the NMA’s impressive facilities. See: https://www.thenma.org.uk/what's-on/exhibitions/lockdown-landscapes

At the forefront of NMA’s concern were the mental health impacts of lockdown and providing an opportunity for diverse people to voice experiences in a safe and supported way alongside an opportunity to creatively explore and share the ways that lockdown impacted them positively and negatively at that time.

As we know, mental illness, mental distress and poor wellbeing are a growing burden to society, not least in the aftermath of the Coronavirus pandemic. Many lost loved ones during this time and marking such losses has become increasingly pertinent. The NMA took the decision to do more around remembrance and the pandemic, to consider routes to healing through commemoration and memorialisation. In Lockdown Landscapes, the NMA have begun important work in bridging for healing impacts from arts and nature-based acts of remembrance on MHWB.

This is important, given the growing burden of mental illness facing society, with the rise in mental disorders set to cost the global economy $16 trillion by 2030 (Patel et al, 2018). The burden has increased recently with major concern about the MHWB impacts of lockdown and high national mortality. The pandemic resulted in a national mental health crisis with unprecedented demand on mental health services, which is unlikely to ease in the short term, not least given the fallout of tragic losses among health service, social care and emergency providers, other key workers, and the wider public. Compounded by socio-economic losses, the threat to the nation’s MHWB has reached a critical level. It is in this context, that remembrance and memorials can play a profound and special role in aiding healing and recovery from the scars of Covid-19.

 

The role of the NMA

The NMA is the nation’s year-round site of remembrance, commemoration and memorialisation of the personal sacrifices of those who have served in the Armed Forces, emergency services and civilian charities, and acknowledges the psychological scars, not least grief, affecting personnel and the families of those who had died. Remembrance is defined as “the act of remembering something, the action of remembering the dead, especially in a ceremony; memory or recollection” (Hendrix, 2020); memorial is defined as “a statue or structure established to remind people of a person or event”, which can include a place and living thing (e.g. a tree); memorialisation is the construction and establishment of memorials, or the embedding of meaning and significance within memorials; and commemoration is defined as “the action or fact of commemorating a dead person or past event” (Lexico, n.d.). Thus, remembrance acts relate to moments of commemoration and objects of memorialisation. Grief and remembrance, while the two are not mutually exclusive, are different acts and processes. Whilst grief is “the anguish experienced after significant loss, usually the death of a beloved person” (APA Dictionary of Psychology), people may ‘remember’ others for any variety of reasons, and wish to mark this in some way in remembrance. Remembrance can also be part of a strategy for dealing with grief.

Part of the Royal British Legion (RBL), the 150-acre arboretum cares for over 25,000 trees, around 8000 of which are dedicated, and over 400 memorials. Each year, the NMA welcomes over 300,000 people through its award-winning Remembrance Centre, complete with visitor facilities, a learning centre and exhibition galleries. It provides the serving community and members of the public with a unique combination of arts-based and natural resources, designed to inspire remembrance and support those living with psychological scars.

The project Lockdown Landscapes complemented earlier moves to respond to the fallout from the pandemic in its installation of a Covid memorial to remember all those lost to the pandemic, and seek to commemorate the sacrifice of NHS and key workers. A new 25-acre section of land was cultivated into a new memorial woodland that will grow over time, and be a place where people can remember, recognise those who have served, reflect on their own experiences, and reconnect with others. These developments underline particular losses to the NHS and social care services but also mark more generally, and relate to the wider loss of life and psychological distress during a time of prolonged confinement and isolation. See: https://www.thenma.org.uk/visit-us/what's-here/the-memorials/livingmemorial.

 

Places of memorial and remembrance

There is a significant body of literature on the establishment of monuments in remembrance of both war and disasters, from a historical perspective and as a way of managing and meaning-making. Boret and Shibayama (2018), writing on the Japan Earthquake disaster) state that monuments have a role in building social ties and education rather than providing closure and placing the events that they commemorate in the past. Gough (2000) describes landscapes of remembrance as having gone through distinct phases, with First World War landscapes being characterised by monuments (war memorials and gravestones), with surrounding public space as a site for ritual. These sites represented a particular official narrative of remembrance (King, 1999) which Hynes (1990) describes as being one of reverence and obedience. But, as the events that these monuments commemorate sink further into the past, alternative narratives are made by changes in the way that people interact with those monuments and repurpose the places and landscapes of remembrance (Bellantani and Panico, 2016). Maddrell (2011) identifies a turn in attitudes to remembrance that places ownership of forms and enactment of remembrance with the bereaved (rather than with a religious or secular authority), and with this a growth in alternative forms of memorialisation. These personal and sometimes private acts of remembrance create a multitude of personal narratives.

 

Arts and Nature-based Remembrance: Lockdown Landscapes

Creative practices have documented potential for transforming people’s MHWB (See APPGAHW, 2017; Crawford, 2018, Crawford et al, 2020; DCMS 2021). For example, drawing has been used as an act of remembrance for children remembering the death of baby siblings (Willer et al., 2018), while Maya Lin’s commemorative wall in Washington D.C. functions as “a catalyst for and an agent of memory” (Saltzman, 2006). Drama is also a useful medium to foster remembrance and reconciliation (Dupuis & Ferguson, 2016). At the heart of these and other creative practices of remembrance are stories. Storytelling is “as much part of us as breathing air” (Crawford et al, 2004) and Wilson (2018) notes, people are “storytelling animals”. Stories are key in helping us understand our environment, our experiences and relationships concerning remembrance. They help us build and convey our identities, the building blocks of our selves. Given that remembrance can be emotionally complex, stories, argues Wilson, help us “navigate our way through it – because stories themselves are inherently messy”. There is growing interest in how stories and metaphor are core to life and can help people negotiate mental health (e.g. Gottschall, 2012). Importantly, stories can also “fundamentally subvert and shift existing power relationships” (Wilson, 2018, p.18; Wilson, 2006), including those that occur in formally instituted remembrance environments. Interactions with nature too have well evidenced impacts on MHWB (Van den Berg et al 2015, Callaghan et al 2020). In its recent developments, not least Lockdown Landscapes, the NMA has utilised its naturalistic areas alongside monuments, formal memorial landscapes, and co-creative, participatory memorialisation methods to great effect.

If you wish to contribute your own experiences of lockdown, you can follow this link:

https://www.thenma.org.uk/what's-on/exhibitions/lockdown-landscapes/map-your-memory

Professor Crawford’s recent publications include: Mental Health Literacy and Young People (Emerald, 2022), Cabin Fever: Surviving Lockdown in the Coronavirus Pandemic (Emerald, 2021), and Florence Nightingale at Home (Palgrave, 2020).

 

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to several colleagues who assisted in developing some of the ideas here relating to the social and cultural assets of remembrance for mental health and wellbeing, not least Mark Ellis, Philippa Rawlinson, Andy Simpson, Christopher Ansell, Aaron Rossi, Professor Mike Wilson, Dr Sachiyo Ito-Jaeger, Professor Elvira Perez, Dr Alison Dyke, and Dr David Crepaz-Keay.

 

References

American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Grief. In APA Dictionary of Psychology. Retrieved October 19, 2021, from https://dictionary.apa.org/grief

All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts Health and Wellbeing (2017) Inquiry Report: Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing. London: APPG. https://www.culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk/appg-inquiry/Publications/Creative_Health_Inquiry_Report_2017_-_Second_Edition.pdf

Bellantani, F. & Panico, M. (2016). The meanings of monuments and memorials: toward a semiotic approach, Punctum, 2(1), 28-46. doi: 10.18680/hss.2016.0004

Boret, S. P. &  Shibayama, A. (2018). The roles of monuments for the dead during the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 29, 55-62. doi:10.1016/j.ijdrr.2017.09.021

Callaghan, A., McCombe, G., Harrold, A., McMeel, C., Mills, G., Moore-Cherry, N., & Cullen, W. (2021). The impact of green spaces on mental health in urban settings: a scoping review. Journal of Mental Health, 30(2), 179-193. doi: 10.1080/09638237.2020.1755027

Crawford, P. (2018) The arts are a shadow health service – here’s why. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-arts-are-a-shadow-health-service-heres-why-105610

Crawford, R., Brown, B. & Crawford, P.  (2004) Storytelling in Therapy. Nelson Thornes: Cheltenham.

Crawford, P. & Crawford, J.O. (2020) Cabin Fever: Surviving Lockdown in the Coronavirus Pandemic. Bingley: Emerald.

Crawford, P., Brown, B. & Charise, A. eds. (2020) The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities. Routledge: London.

Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (2021) Boundless Creativity Report. With AHRC. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1005410/Boundless_Creativity_v1.pdf

Dupuis, J. K. & Ferguson, K. (2016). Fostering remembrance and reconciliation through an arts-based response. [Indigenous Education] in education, 22(1), 127-147. doi: https://doi.org/10.37119/ojs2016.v22i1.235

Gottschall, J. (2012). The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Boston.

Gough, P. (2000). From heroes’ groves to parks of peace: Landscapes of remembrance, protest and peace. Landscape Research, 25(2), 213-228. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/713684669

Hendrix, K. G. (2020). Disrupting institutional erasure: Organizational exit, remembrance, value, and the need to matter. Gender, Work & Organization, 28(4), 1323-1336. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12609

Hynes, S. (1990). A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. Bodley Head: London.

King, A. (1998) Memorials of the Great War in Britain: the symbolism and politics of remembrance. Berg: Oxford. https://www.lexico.com/definition/commemoration

Maddrell, A. and Sidaway, J., eds. (2010) Deathscapes: spaces for death, dying, mourning and remembrance. Routledge, pp328. ISBN 9780754679752

Patel, V., Saxena, S., Lund, C., et al. (2018). The lancet commission on global mental health and sustainable development. The Lancet, 392, 1553-1598. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31612-X

Saltzman, L. (2006). Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

Van den Berg, M.,  Wendel-Vos, W., Van Poppel, M., Kemper, H., Van Mechelen, W. And Maas, J. (2015) Health benefits of green spaces in the living environment: A systematic review of epidemiological studies. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 14 (4), 806-816,

Willer, E. K., Droser, V. A., Hoyt, K. D., et al. (2018). A visual narrative analysis of children’s baby loss remembrance drawings. Journal of Family Communication, 18(2), 153-169. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/15267431.2018.1428608

Wilson, M. (2006). Storytelling and Theatre Contemporary Professional Storytellers and Their Art. Palgrave Macmillan: London.

Wilson, M. (2018). Some thoughts on storytelling, science and dealing with a post-truth world, Storytelling, Self, Society, 12(1), 120-137. doi: 10.13110/storselfsoci.13.1.0120