The overall aim of The Loneliness Room is to shine a critical and creative light on where, when, how and why loneliness is encountered. It intends to provide a new creative canvass with which to better understand how people live lonely, providing them with the artistic space to represent their loneliness.

 

The Loneliness Room is an example of participatory culture, of co-creation, since it is the lonely artwork of ordinary people which in part fill the ‘lungs’ of this website. In so-doing, the project extends and enriches the boundaries of creative ethnography since these lifeworld practices newly re-imagine what it means to be lonely.

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For the purpose of this project the loneliness room is defined as a real or imagined space where we feel lonely or find loneliness. We may also prefer to call this quality or state one of aloneness, where it is solitude and isolation that we seek. 

 

Each of us will have our very own version of the loneliness room: it could be the hills we walk on, a morning swim at the beach or the local swimming pool, listening to a certain sad song in our bedroom, the morning commute, writing in our diary, or the park we go to sit in at lunchtime.

 

The project explores not just the isolation of loneliness but the social, creative and experiential possibilities of loneliness in all walks of life: this is loneliness as a natural part of the human condition. The Loneliness Room explores, then, both the chronic and the existential conditions of being lonely today.

 

I asked those interested in taking part to respond to the idea of the loneliness room through sharing their creative responses and/or completing short questionnaires. These creative responses came in the forms of: photographs (with/without captions); short videos; drawings; paintings; poems; social media posts; and songs, composition, audio. A workshop was also held with men from the Coventry Mens shed, in England.

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At times, the responses are confronting, challenging, wrapped up in the pain of the participant. At others, they catch the beauty and freedom of certain forms of loneliness. 

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In this website I have thematically divided up these loneliness room submissions. However, themes cross-connect in quite beautiful and moving ways. Which room will you enter first?

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Sean Redmond, 2023

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