Good Byes is the working title of an ongoing artist research project by artist film maker Lucy Parker that explores how we say goodbye and wish each other well. 

Boundaries are understood within Community Services to form a guide for protection and dignity of the self, and of others.  Within such settings human relationships inevitably form, and individuals develop a personal regard for one another.  Given this, relational ‘endings’ require care, otherwise they risk being rushed and under-developed perhaps due to short term funding, stretched services, or through a fear of crossing boundaries or perceived impropriety.

Good Byes develops out of Lucy’s experience working in education, support and care worker roles, reflecting on her relationships forged in these roles, and how interpersonal endings and transitions are cared for and attended too.  

Lucy's enquiry asks how we do reconcile connection and empathy within the limits of our current institutional structures? How might our endings speak about forms of community and kinship?How are such relationships with community services mutually understood? And how might we reimagine new ways to relate to each other within our institutions and workplace?

In therapeutic practice for example, it’s common for the therapist to write a letter to their client, one that reflects on the ground covered and builds on the strengths reached.  Receiving a letter can create a resource for a client to return to but also offers a symbolic function, taking the time to say goodbye.

Working collaboratively with people working in Community Services Lucy wants to create a space for solidarity, in which people can come together to share their experiences and practices, and to imagine new ones.  In doing so she hopes to create opportunities for sharing and building approaches that can be applied to our mutual organisational practices. 

Lucy’s artistic ambition is to create ‘an archival resource of endings’,  and a new video installation that can tour nationally to organisations and galleries and be screened as a learning resource within community contexts.

Good Byes is produced by TACO! , and commisisoned by Three Rivers Bexley, with support from Arts Council England.


If you or someone you know would like to learn more about Good Byes, contribute to Lucy’s research, or help develop the project then please get in touch through here.


Lucy Parker is an artist filmmaker, film educator and homelessness case worker living in London. Her film work explores spectrums of political and social practices that enable, or form barriers to, community led change.  She is motivated by the desire to imagine and live in a way not built on dominance and extraction; this motivation informs her approach to making, seeking collaborative exchanges and striving to build community around a films production and distribution.  Her films have been screened in the UK and Internationally. She was the recipient of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam 'First Appearance' prize in 2019 for the feature film ‘Solidarity’, which premiered at Sheffield Doc Fest and in London at Open City.   She is currently taking part in the UK based Film-in-Mind mentorship programme. Her films are distributed by LUX, London.

Three Rivers is a free-floating social arts agency working with local partners to support creative practices, which recognise, resource and respond to people, place, land and community, in the London Borough of Bexley.

Image: film still from Solidarity, Lucy Parker, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist.