Jane McCabe with the support of Fanshaw Projects invites death doula Rebecca Illing to lead a Death Café, a group-led conversation that encourages open discussion around death, dying, and what it means to live fully. Also acting as an open studio event, this will be a chance to see Jane McCabe’s work in progress during her residency at Fanshaw Projects. 

We will gather in Fanshaw Projects’ living room space that is open to all and relationships to death and grief are valid and welcome. Rebecca aims to create a space where you can acknowledge life, what you have lost, and everything in-between. Death and grief often remain overlooked, shrouded in uncertainty and fear. The reality is that death makes life whole.

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Biography

Rebecca Illing is a compassionate and dedicated death doula whose work centers on fostering open, meaningful conversations around death and dying within her community. With a deep commitment to shifting societal perspectives, Rebecca is passionate about addressing the alienation we often feel toward death and the tendency to engage with mortality only when it is too late.

Rebecca offers personalised, one-on-one sessions to clients seeking to explore their own lives, better understand their mortality, and prepare consciously for death. She also provides invaluable support to families and friends navigating illness and grief. Additionally, Rebecca leads bereavement retreats in Portugal and hosts the Death Cafe at The Hearth, offering a safe space for individuals to gather, share, and reflect on the many aspects of death and dying.

Through her work, Rebecca strives to create environments where the topics of life, death, and everything in between can be explored openly, with care and respect.

For any inquiries, please contact: info@fanshawprojects.com

In this combined Open Studio and Reading Group facilitated by Sophia Kosmaoglou, participants will examine Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s text Expiration: The Last Breath to discuss the psycho-cultural perceptions of mortality under end-stage capitalism. Set within McCabe’s cyanotype-based practice – where scattering ashes, light exposure, and stitched time materialise as images – the session invites us to consider how the gesture of recording might itself become an act of chaosmosis, of signification, and of attunement to impermanence.

We will gather in Fanshaw Projects’ living room space as a group capped at 15 people. RSVP is essential and a link to the reading materials will be sent upon confirmation of attendance. 

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Sophia Kosmaoglou is an artist, educator and organiser working at the intersection of art, politics and pedagogy. Her interdisciplinary practice spans installation, moving image, performance, writing and critical research. She is the founder of ART&CRITIQUE, an alternative art education network committed to critical engagement with practice, theory and research, and co-founder of the Radical Pedagogy Research Group.Her work explores the politics of visibility, artistic autonomy, institutional critique and collective learning. She has a degree in sculpture and a practice-based PhD in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, where she taught studio practice and critical studies. She is a visiting tutor in critical studies and curating at Chelsea College of Arts UAL and an Artist Advisor at Artquest. Her current focus is on building a co-operative art school as a sustainable, self-organised alternative to mainstream art education.

Jane McCabe earned her BA in Studio Art and Architecture from Middlebury College 2015 before going into completing her MFA in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths University (2023). McCabe currently lives and works in London, UK.

McCabe is a conceptual artist making photo objects, sculpture, and video projections, concerning the compulsion to record in relation to mortality. Her material investigations constitute abstracted indexes of experiential time. In her ongoing series, cyanotype photograms on silk of her father’s ashes are sensitised at night and printed in daylight. This active light-tracing demands a methodology which is both intuitive and practical. The act of scattering is one of collaboration of the hand wind and silk, where the climatic conditions determine both the formation of ash, and the deep blue time of the exposure. Across this series, repetition becomes habit becomes ritual.