What do we do when we experience something so devastating that we are lost for words?

Lydia Hounat ran a session at Woodlane Campus, Falmouth, on Tuesday to investigate and get people to "unpack" themselves.

Lydia is a British-Algerian artist, who graduated from Falmouth University in 2018, is now undertaking an MA at the Royal College of Art, London, and is a poet in residence at Manchester Metropolitan University.

The session was an intimate journey through the group's life experiences, what brings them happiness, destroying those and then reconciling.

Nub News took part in the session and sat down with Lydia during the interval to discuss the session further, she said: "The reason that I am running these workshops is that I am currently a poet in residence at Manchester Met University. We have been using the special archives collections there too find inspiration and locate ideas from different books.

"One of the tasks that I set was two minutes tying knots into a piece of string, then untying them and then looking at what the string looked like afterwards, and essentially not being the same. Looking at trauma in life, being that kind of way, being in knots that we cannot untangle."

The idea behind making the participants tie the string stemmed from a dream Lydia had as a young child, and conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov. Kabakov was a Russian American conceptual artist who placed all the details of his life on a rope, the piece called 'The Rope of Life', leaving a gap at the end and the beginning of the rope because he could not recall what happened before he was born or what will happen in the future.

Lydia hopes that the sessions will help people to be in touch with their emotions, she added: "We are living in a society where anxiety and mental health issues are becoming more prevalent, in fact, normal.

"I think we are becoming more distant from ourselves in terms of making art, and in terms of being in touch with our emotions because we use things like phones, computers and social media to replace those avenues of self-expression. They don't arise from an organic place within us, they arise from a different persona online that we feel we need to maintain."

There is likely to be more sessions in the future as Lydia returns to Falmouth to finish her MA, with bigger sessions and one to ones being organised from September.

To find out more about Lydia's work, and how to contact her, click the button below.