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Anatomy of Loss is a digital arts exposition published in the Research Catalogue, An International Database for Artistic Research, that explores mourning, embodiment, and relational care through artistic work. The exposition consists of short films, sound compositions, poetic texts, and reflective fragments developed collaboratively by Halstead and Schmid in response to the deaths of their parents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conceived as both process and presentation, the exposition situates artistic creation as a form of inquiry, where aesthetic practice operates as method rather than illustration.
The structure of the work is non-linear and multimodal, inviting viewers to navigate between sound, image, and text in a way that mirrors the discontinuous and recursive nature of mourning. This open form embodies what the authors describe as an arts-based, feminist-philosophical approach to grief. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from music therapy, phenomenology, and feminist philosophy, Anatomy of Loss examines how aesthetic and embodied practices can generate knowledge about dying and bereavement that lies beyond the reach of conventional medical or textual representation.
Several works within the exposition — A Song Without Words, Ähnlichwerden I: Cleaning the Sink, and Doppelgänger — explore gesture, sound, and memory through Thomas Fuchs’s ideas of intercorporeality and Ähnlichwerden—how bodily memory sustains relational continuity across absence and loss.
The dialogic interplay of text, sound and image is approached as a form of aesthetic answering (Lecourt, 1991; Knill, Levine & Levine, 2005): a responsive and creative mode of communication grounded in arts therapy, where expression and empathy unfold through artistic form. Here, aesthetic answering occurs not only within the works themselves but also between the authors, who respond to each other’s materials through acts of listening, adaptation, and artistic dialogue. This reciprocal process turns collaboration into a method of inquiry, producing understanding through shared aesthetic responsiveness rather than interpretation alone.
By integrating artistic production, autobiographical reflection, and theoretical discourse, Anatomy of Loss demonstrates a crystallisation methodology (Ellingson, 2009), where multiple forms of representation—textual, sonic, visual—refract different facets of the same lived phenomenon. This methodology not only deepens interdisciplinary dialogue between art, therapy, and the humanities but also challenges dominant paradigms of evidence and objectivity in health-related research.
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The short film Cut Up forms a pivotal element within the Anatomy of Loss exposition, exemplifying how artistic practice can function simultaneously as creative method and critical inquiry. The work takes as its material the text of the accompanying article Hearing Loss: Listening to End-of-Life Transitions, an Arts-Based Approach to Midlife Mourning (Halstead & Schmid, 2023), literally and conceptually deconstructing the language of research. Fragments of the article are cut, rearranged, and layered with sound and moving image to generate a new compositional form that reconfigures the relationship between writing, image, and sound.