This study examines the nature of the belongings of the deceased and the work of mourning in contemporary society. Taking as its point of departure the clearing of my grandmother’s home, it seeks to create artworks that provide a space in which viewers may resonate with the belongings of the deceased. In 2024, the sorting of my grandmother’s objects began, and I started documenting them before the traces through which I might come to know her and her family were lost. Everyday things once gathered for living become large volumes of belongings upon the death of their owner, leaving little room for those who sort them to remember the dead. In recent years in Japan, the belongings of the deceased have increasingly been treated as unwanted remnants. Faced with this situation, I undertook my research in order to reconsider what these belongings truly are, and to investigate my grandmother’s objects.

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The research began by organising information on my grandmother and her family, tracing the history of the house and its surrounding area, and compiling a comprehensive inventory of the objects. Specifically, I constructed a family tree to clarify relationships and birth years, thereby establishing the historical context in which my grandmother and her family lived. I examined her diary in order to reveal the intimate details of her everyday life, and gathered information about the neighbourhood to determine the period of construction of the house, its setting, and the relationship between the family and their locality. I also produced a floor plan of the house, which revealed the history of its alterations shaped by lived experience within it. Through the comprehensive survey, the volume and typology of the surviving objects became clear, and by consulting the diary and other organised source materials, the circumstances of my grandmother’s final years were illuminated. Drawing on the definitions of the belongings of the deceased proposed by Margaret Gibson, I reinterpreted their characteristics through the lens of my grandmother’s objects.

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Based on these findings, I am creating a participatory installation that addresses the nature of the belongings of the deceased and the work of mourning in the contemporary era. Using my grandmother’s belongings as its principal material, the installation consists of six sculptural pieces that reflect the various aspects of these themes. Even as the connection between each object and the deceased weakens over time, the belongings nonetheless continue to record and transmit the traces of a life once lived. They serve as a silent testimony to presence, absence, love, memory, and the complex negotiations between the living and the dead.

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The experience of making this work brought forth broader themes, including the idea of the house as an organisational body, kinship, the cyclical nature of life, and the disappearance of death within contemporary Japanese society. These reflections have led me to consider expanding the project to explore belongings left behind by others in addition to my grandmother.