The night garden : pet memorialisation through the application of skilled craft : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Design at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

Abstract

Pet owners will experience the loss of their beloved pet. Unlike human loss, pet loss can be compounded by its repeated experience throughout a person’s life. Pets contribute precious moments and facilitate emotional connections, but unlike our human family, they leave little behind by way of tangible objects, limiting our opportunity for memory provocation through physical reminders of their lives. My creative practice investigates how memories attributed to objects can offer an evocative mode of connection between emotional experiences and tangible souvenirs of our pets’ lives. The final design, a playful sculptural reliquary, incorporates visual and tactile storytelling mechanisms; it explores optical effects to enhance the physical engagement with the object and its associative memory. Drawing on my background as a toy maker together with pop surrealist aesthetics, the research explores skilled craft as a strategy for deepening memorialisation. The design investigates the relationship between the care taken in fashioning highly crafted objects as an amplification of the importance that we place on our pets as a non-human family. The design process adopts a personal introspective methodology, whereby outcomes are driven by contextual, research-led reflective practice, through iterative methods of drawing and physical prototyping. I argue that by creating memorial objects that ‘eulogise’ our pet grief as personal touchstones, an acceptance of pet mourning as a growing social evolution is better understood. The resolved design is a storytelling device that reveals through ritual engagement, exploring mnemonic objects that enshrine memories of deceased pets, and the role of such objects as memory devices in the maintenance of their memory.