We are sisters, Katy and Lindsey Vigurs (Vigurs rhymes with tigers) and we are the founding directors of DEAD GOOD CIC. We’re a not-for-profit, arts-based deathwork & death education company based in the UK. We personally believe that it is not morbid to speak openly about death and we see honest conversations about death and dying as the foundation of a healthy society. Ultimately, through our activities we aim to address the environmental damage of traditional funeral practices, to widen access to end-of-life planning conversations, and to tackle the issue of funeral poverty. 

Katy’s background is in academia. She’s an award-winning university teacher and social researcher, with expertise in creative approaches to research and public engagement. Lindsey has spent most of her life working as an artist and commercial illustrator for clients such as the BBC. More recently she has been commissioned to create ‘death conscious’ public art, such as her ‘IT’S OKAY TO DECAY’ billboard installation. As well as a public provocation, this large scale artwork was a memorial to our dad, Peter Vigurs, who died in 2022. About Us — Dead Good

What is your fondest memory?

We spent 2021 creating a range of imaginative living tributes for our dad who had been diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer, which allowed him to reflect back on his life and reconnect with old friends and acquaintances. He said it was the best year of his life (weep).

What is your proudest moment?

We are working with a number of clients who are living with terminal illnesses and know they will likely die young. They have commissioned us because they want to talk straightforwardly about death and dying and they want to make creative, bespoke plans for their funerals. We’ve also worked with individuals and families to help them celebrate or commemorate the life of someone who has died. We’ve made hundreds of personalised wildflower clay seedballs. Families choose words to describe the life and personality of the person who has died, we then make clay seedballs and hand stamp a different word onto each ball, before wrapping them up in bright tissue paper. The seedballs are then carried to meaningful places and left on a patch of earth or grass as a DIY act of personal remembrance. We have also taken several commissions for badges to be given out at funerals, where a life motto or nickname is printed on a badge for mourners to keep.

What three words best describe you?

LV: creative, authentic & quirky

KV: inclusive, playful & innovative 

What don’t people know about you?

We specialise in supporting people to plan eco-friendly funerals, living funerals and home funerals. Oh and we have our own line of eco-death merch, including a number of limited edition items (screen prints, enamel pins, and memento mori coins created from acrylic waste).

How would you want to be remembered?

As a creative social enterprise that supported lots of individuals and families to handle encounters with death, dying & grief in personally meaningful ways.

Or perhaps as the sisters who ran stalls at arts markets as a stealthy way to get people to think about their relationship with mortality. We’d also like to be remembered for our non-binary skull logo, named by our community, as Boney Mitchell.

Contact details:

@deadgoodlegacies (Instagram and Facebook)

www.deadgood.org 

hello@deadgood.org