A Sense Of Grief Sue Ryder Leeds Corn Exchange

Words By Maddie Armstrong / Images Mark Wheelwright 

In the heart of Leeds city centre sits a vibrant shopping hub home to everything from quaint plant shops to tattoo parlours and art exhibitions. The Corn Exchange building, dome shaped on the outside, consists of ring-shaped floors on its interior, with each shop entrance decorated with a different brightly coloured door. The floors look down on the open below-ground space, which has no singular purpose. Overall, it’s a lovely design that brings the whole building together nicely.

This last Thursday and Friday that particular space was carefully decorated with an exhibition dedicated to grief brought by Sue Ryder. It’s a famous charity providing palliative and bereavement support, offering a space for those affected with grief to share their experiences and feelings. At the exhibition we had some of these messages and anecdotes displayed alongside sentimental objects, such as perfumes, paintings, vinyls and CD players, and an abundance of flowers. 

One exhibit in particular struck me: the large flower bed. The plaque sitting comfortably in the greenery narrated someone’s memory of losing their wife at a young age, and breaking down at the sight of the flowerbeds they’d created together in the garden. What this exhibition does beautifully is take care of the things we don’t often initially think about when grief comes to mind. It’s a gentle ode to the little things that mean the most. One poem that was displayed, written by a contributor called Katherine, detailed the process of accepting grief as a long-term companion after the initial gifts and words fade out. 

Shooting the exhibits was a special task. Mark and I shared the workload  using the Nikon 24-70mm and 70-200mm 2.8f pro lenses and  getting those lovely large aperture shots. With the shallow depth of field, the background and surroundings were dramatically blurred to isolate the object intimately, which I found was rather fitting. You don’t want to think about the rest of the world when grieving. Similarly, each object, filled with memories and stories, ought to be absorbed on its own, without distraction.

What was perhaps the biggest struggle was actually getting candid shots of people. Perhaps it was due to the setup being on the sunken below-ground floor of the strange interior of the Corn Exchange. Shoppers tend to catch a glimpse of what’s going on down there as they dive in and out of shops, but most didn’t want to commit to walking down the stairs to have a good look. When someone did come to visit however, Mark and I would dart in and out of the shadows to get undistracting shots of visitors carefully reading the displays’ blurbs. Occasionally myself and a couple others working at the exhibition posed for Mark as an onlooker to compensate, as we already had an abundance of shots of people-less exhibits. This entailed taking a pretend sniff of the perfumes and mint leaves, putting on the headphones attached to the CD player, or just simply walking around. 

We made sure to get portraits and landscapes, the former more for the purpose of social media. Of course, as each contributor would like to have an image of their display, we ensured each individual exhibit had at least one isolated shot. I also got the idea of running up the stairs to the higher floors and get some nice overhead views, just to add more variety to our set of images. 

In the end, it was a delightful and thoughtful exhibition that was gentle in approach, and provided a tender memory to onlookers of their loved ones, reminding them how precious each little relic and memory becomes when they’re no longer around. It’s these small, peculiar things - often overlooked - that become the biggest of them all.