Artist Jane Fox's three-part series of drawings, Wind Drawings, Distance Drawings and Scrub Drawings were drawn together under the title of The Mourning Stone project.
She was drawn to walking in the South Downs chalk landscape after bereavement, carrying a small flint stone picked up on the day of her father’s death. In order to ‘steady’ herself and to explore feelings of loss, she began to ask how artists instinctively use the materials around them to improvise with purpose? Also how a practitioner of a touch-based drawing practice might connect with the landscapes they are in and how this might help articulate grief.
The research process involved using the wind and other natural elements to conjoin performance elements with drawing. Jane Fox emerged with a far deeper understanding of the process, one that went beyond existing social and cultural rituals allocated to mourning. She began to understand a shared agency with the materiality of the chalk down land and a method that used touch and sound to engage and tune into the intangible within a landscape.
Jane Fox has brought this research alongside other work by members of the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing. As well as exhibiting the resulting drawings in Sussex and Norway (2019), she has used the work in collaborative journal, authoring with Duncan Bullen and , '' (2016), and a co-authored book chapter with published in (2019).