In addition to the physical banners around the UK, each of the four new works commissioned for The Many Costs of Living is available online as an animated campaign banner and in an audio described animation of all four works. You can find out more about the artwork below or by reading our exhibition catalogue.

Explore the rest of the show Find out more about the artist

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📢 Listen to this animation audio described:

About It Feels Like This

It Feels Like This is a process-based artwork using mediums of sculpture and text. Handwritten text is scrawled onto the back of a seemingly ordinary, opened brown envelope, with a return address printed along the edge of the fold. The envelope is taken from the artist’s own archive of correspondences from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Motivated by concepts of public and private space and where the sick and/or disabled body exists within them, Milroy draws upon the experience of such correspondences and how they enter the home, often in both covert and overt ways; invisible to some, terrifyingly obvious to others. The envelope sits as a sculptural foundation to the handwritten text, acting as both a scrap of paper on which lists are scribbled, and physical material embedded with a host of weighted narratives: the violation of the home, the absence of privacy, the pervasive hostility of the state, and the precariousness of depending upon it to live.

It Feels Like This speaks to the ways in which we are often left without words. We continue to experience profound loss, the cost of which feels unceasing. When “normal” is used as a bludgeon to erase, divide, and forget, sitting with our grief becomes powerful. It is in the raw, bruising of heartache that we can action upon hope for things to be better, without ignoring the pain and the loss, and the price that is paid, continuously, along with it.

📢 Listen to a description of the artwork:

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Banner image description: Digitally-rendered still capturing a virtual gallery-like environment in which an artwork appears to hang from a white wall. The work is a portrait digital scan of the back of an opened brown A5 envelope with a ragged edge. In very small print on the left hand side is the return address for the Department of Work and Pensions. The back of the envelope features a verse handritten by the artist in black marker pen. It reads: Awoken by the loss of warmth; Mourning tenderness and touch; Exhausted by the cost; We are a body, grieving; Aching for enough, Dreaming of rest, Imagining a future that shines. The work casts a shadow on the white wall, creating a three dimensional effect in the still.