Mark Storor: Close to Home

Heart of Glass presents Close To Home, a five-week installation and public programme by artist Mark Storor and collaborators, bringing together more than eight years of work developed through sustained collaboration with communities and individuals with lived and living experience of suicide across England, Ireland, and Wales.

The installation forms part of The Suicide Chronicles, an ongoing body of work by Storor that has developed through long-term, participatory encounters with people whose lives have been impacted by suicide, loss, and bereavement. Rather than approaching suicide as a subject for representation, Storor’s practice creates conditions in which lived experience, memory, testimony, and collective forms of making can be encountered and shared. Across film, photography, sculpture, poetry, music, and performance, the works in Close To Home attend to the particularity of individual experience while opening onto wider questions of grief, care, community, and remembrance.

The project has brought together diverse groups and perspectives, including women bereaved by the suicide of their partners, farming communities affected by suicide, people navigating intergenerational experiences of suicide, and first responders. Developed through extended processes of collaboration, the resulting works resist a single narrative of suicide or bereavement, instead holding space for experiences that are often difficult to articulate or publicly acknowledged.

Heart of Glass is a socially engaged arts organisation based in Merseyside in the Northwest of the UK. Its long-term projects are developed with artists and communities through sustained processes of collaboration, usually taking place beyond conventional gallery settings. Through this approach, Heart of Glass supports forms of artistic practice that respond to local experience while connecting communities with wider social and cultural questions.

At the historic Cunard Building, Close To Home occupies the Arrivals Hall as a theatrical landscape through which visitors can move at their own pace. The installation brings together the accumulated materials of The Suicide Chronicles, creating a spatial experience that moves between encounter and reflection. Rather than presenting the works as a linear account, the exhibition allows visitors to spend time with individual works and with the stories and experiences held within them. Spaces for quiet, rest, and contemplation are incorporated into the installation.

A programme of free performances, conversations, and gatherings will accompany the exhibition throughout September and October. It's Not Home ’Til You Hold Me brings together music, song, and poetry developed through The Suicide Chronicles. Conversations with Tom Overton, Professor Edith Hall, and Professor Amy Chandler will consider different dimensions of suicide, loss, culture, and lived experience. The programme concludes on 10 October with To Lay to Rest That Which Needed to Rest and Allow Yourself to Let Them Rest, a closing ceremony marking the end of the exhibition.

Close To Home does not depict suicide. Instead, it engages directly with experiences of suicide, loss, grief, and bereavement, foregrounding the voices and perspectives of those who have lived through them. The exhibition is recommended for adults and includes support information for visitors.

Close To Home is led by Heart of Glass and artist Mark Storor, in partnership with Culture Liverpool and Public Health Liverpool. Supported by Arts Council England, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, and Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

With thanks to FPC and Brabners for sponsorship support and to the Community Foundations for Lancashire & Merseyside and Mark McQueen Memorial Fund for additional support.