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Several incidents led artist Mark Storor to spend eight years creating work with people whose lives have been touched by suicide. There was the way the subject kept slipping into conversation during his residency with social arts agency Heart of Glass in St Helens. There was the data revealing the town had the highest suicide rate in England from 2015-2017. But the clincher was a quiet chat with a man helping him move house.
The man came with a van and a friend – a silent friend who just stood there, not helping to carry the furniture from Storor’s flat at the top of an otherwise empty former housing association tower block. Once all the belongings were moved, the friend departed and the furniture mover sat down and apologised.
Storor says: “He said, ‘I’m really sorry about my friend but I’m very worried about him.’ He went on to tell me how he’d lost five friends to suicide in the previous 18 months and had felt suicidal himself. He’d only had £400 and had bought the van. It was quite a struggle but he had begun to build the business, and he brought his friend with him so he could keep an eye on him.”
In the next chapter of his work Baa Baa Baric: Have You Any Pull Storor created an ‘alternative fairytale’ for the town and, he says, choosing suicide as its subject was “imperative”.
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