Hi Vizzy D’s, Writing to you today from Kabi Kabi Country on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland. I’ve been immersed this week in Artlands, Australia’s biggest gathering of regional creative practitioners. It’s part symposium, part think tank, part workshop. A big, beautiful gathering of artists, cultural workers, First Nations knowledge holders, thinkers, policymakers and collaborators asking some pretty big questions about the role of creative practice. And I’ve found myself thinking a LOT about death care. Because what if creativity isn’t just something we bring TO death care? What if creativity is one of the ways we actually change it? Whilst I have an Arts degree and have worn many creative hats over the years, it’s clear to me now that my current creative practice is death. It’s what I pour my heart and imagination into: funeral ceremony, participatory rituals, designing experiences that help people navigate grief, belonging and the enormous liminal space between what was and what comes next. Even the punish of creating social media content - it’s all part of thinking about death care in creative ways. And the more I work in this space, the more I see that we’re not just talking about designing better funerals. We’re talking about systems. A funeral industry built around particular assumptions about who holds the knowledge, who makes the decisions, what a funeral looks like, what a family’s role is, what happens to a body, where grief belongs and how much participation we’re allowed. And systems are notoriously good at reproducing themselves. So if we want something different, we need to be able to imagine something different first. And that’s where creativity comes in. Artists have always been pretty good at asking: What if? What if the family held the ceremony? What if a funeral could happen somewhere other than a chapel? What if children were welcomed into the ritual? What if the coffin was made by the community? What if grief was something we made space for rather than something we tried to move people through?

Death care content can feel like shouting into the void sometimes - especially in the early days, especially on platforms that don’t always love what we talk about. So let’s make it a little less lonely… Drop your handles below - Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, wherever you’re showing up - and let’s go find each other. Follow, engage, share what moves you. This is how we build something together. 🐦‍⬛ I’ll go first: Insta - https://www.instagram.com/amyfirthministry TT - https://www.tiktok.com/@aussiedeathcarelady Facebook - www.facebook.com/amyfirthmusic The Visible Death Worker: https://www.instagram.com/visibledeathworker https://www.tiktok.com/@visibledeathworker Amy x