THE death of a loved one affects people in different ways.

When Carolyn Savidge's husband died from cancer, she found solace in the inspirational landscape surrounding their home in the Mendip Hills.

For Carolyn, a performance artist, choreographer and writer, being immersed in her surroundings became inseparable from the narrative of her husband’s decline and eventual death, and in turn produced a permanent artistic vision and memorial to his life.

The wind, the mist, the landscape, the sound of her husband’s breath, the monstrous artefacts surrounding his treatment, the forbidding anonymity of the hospital, the spoken word even though his voice was lost – all this and more find expression in the work, called, Embrace DNR.

The interactive work will be exhibited daily at The Princess Theatre in Burnham, culminating in a workshop and conversation where Carolyn, assisted by a friend who is a dancer, will read and perform from Embrace DNR diaries. Opening a discussion on creative ways of approaching loss and bereavement, with an opportunity to be creative with words and imagery.

Embrace DNR revolves around the cathartic events in Carolyn’s personal life, and the strategies and processes she developed in trying to deal with those events. It equally expresses an evolution of her artistic practice in exploring various pathways that enable her – and indeed anyone – to revisit and examine such experiences.

The Embrace is a wide-ranging bringing together of pivotal images, sculpture, text and electronically-derived sound. Carolyn’s intention in creating these visionary artworks has been to open her experiences to wider scrutiny while also alluding to her own keen sense of lost identity, often by indications of her presence in the work.

By gathering together and incorporating recorded interviews, responses, images and story, by studying how these intimate interactions may spring from the locality (that place we know as home) Embrace DNR creates an authentic sense of presence and familiarity in new locations and spaces, enabling audiences and individuals to immerse themselves in considering new-found realities, and to walk, and identify, and find something to cling on to.

Tuesday, July 12 to Friday, July 15. 10am-3pm in the Arts Lounge. Workshop, Friday, July 15 at 7.30pm.