In a small studio at the bottom of his parents’ garden in Liverpool, Gary Harper begins each painting by making room for someone who is no longer there.

Before he starts, he clears the room, sets out crystals, and plays music that meant something to the person whose ashes he has been entrusted with. A small amount is mixed into the paint. Then he begins.

For Gary, these are not simply commissions, nor are they spectacle. The paintings are built from the details that made a person who they were: the city they loved, the bar they returned to, the beach they chose for a holiday, the songs they played, the objects they kept close. Most take the form of landscapes or still lifes, forms that leave space for memory to settle.

“I want to know a person completely,” he says. “The places they loved, where they got married, the music they listened to, even their favourite drink. I put their music on while I work because I want it to feel like they’re there with me. I’m not just using them in the paint. I’m making the painting with them.”

He did not set out to make memorial art. He had loved painting since school, but drifted elsewhere, training as a barber after encouragement from his sister, a hairdresser. For years, art remained private, something he continued without showing anyone.

That changed in 2024, when he began posting work online. “I didn’t even have a proper art page,” he says. “I just put something on Facebook for fun and someone asked if they could buy it. I remember thinking, that’s mad. I’d only ever painted for myself.”

One of those early paintings, he now realises, was already a kind of memorial. A friend had lost someone close, and Gary painted sunflowers in response. It was bought. Then another followed. Gradually, the work found an audience.

The idea that would come to define it arrived later, after the death of his cousin at the end of 2024, four days before Christmas. She died on his sister’s birthday. At the time, he could barely speak.

“It was horrible,” he says. “I can talk about it now, but I couldn’t then.”

Nearly a year later, he was working on a painting of a Liverpool bar she had loved, a place tied up with dancing, old country songs and nights out. He had always been drawn to texture in paint, using glitter, sand, clay, even ground glass. The thought came to him quietly: could ashes be worked into it?

“I remember thinking, could I use ashes in art? Then I thought, that’s a crazy idea. Completely bizarre. But once it was there, I couldn’t let it go.”

What followed, after a period of experimenting, is something gentler than the premise suggests. The ashes are not displayed or foregrounded. They disappear into the work itself. What remains is often a place: somewhere familiar, somewhere lived in. Something that can be kept in the home, rather than set aside.

“It’s a way of keeping someone in the house,” he says. “Even if it’s not put up straight away, it’s not just a box somewhere. It becomes part of things again.”

The appeal of the work sits within a broader shift in how people approach death and remembrance. Cremation ashes are turned into jewellery, folded into tattoos, sent into space. Practices that might once have felt unusual have become, if not commonplace, then at least imaginable.

Gary does not offer a theory for why. “People want something personal,” he says. “They want to feel connected to the person they’ve lost. Maybe that would have felt strange before. Now it doesn’t as much.”

Not everyone who gets in touch goes on to commission a painting. Some enquire, begin to describe an idea, then disappear. He does not follow them up. Grief moves at its own pace, he says. This kind of work cannot be hurried.

“You can’t push people with it. You have to wait until they’re ready.”

Those early conversations can be unexpectedly intimate. Sometimes it is a relative reaching out after a death. Sometimes it is the person themselves, making plans while they are still alive. He begins by offering condolences, then asks for stories. The details that come back are often ordinary in ways that feel most telling: a particular street, a holiday spot, a dog, a bottle kept in the kitchen, a song that must be played.

“You hear someone’s whole life,” he says, “but through the small things.”

The process has drawn him back to his own losses. Wanting to show families how ashes are incorporated into paint, he decided he could not ask someone else to trust him unless he had done it himself. He opened the ashes of his childhood dog, Jack, who died in 2017.

“We had never opened them before,” he says. “I said to my mum, I can’t ask someone else to do this if I wouldn’t do it with my own dog.”

He painted Sefton Park, where Jack used to walk. The dog had always been afraid of the water, skirting the edge while others ran in. At first, Gary placed the ashes in the sky. As the paint shifted, some moved into the lake.

“I just thought, oh my God, he’s finally in the water,” he says. “It sounds small, but it really got me. He never would have gone in when he was alive.”

If the making is emotional, the handover often is too. Gary usually delivers the work himself when he can. There are tears, embraces, a sense of something easing, even if only slightly.

“It gives people peace,” he says. “That’s the best way I can put it.”

There is also the weight of responsibility. What he is handling is irreplaceable. The practical anxiety sits alongside the emotional one.

“The biggest worry is getting the ashes to me safely,” he says. “Once they’re here, I can focus. But it’s always there, what it means to people.”

He returns often to the question of trust. Families are allowing a stranger to handle what remains of someone they loved. The fact of it still surprises him.

“It’s massive,” he says. “I don’t take it lightly.”

For now, he balances the memorial work with a wider practice. There are plans for a summer exhibition of non-memorial paintings, and thoughts of working more closely with funeral homes and crematoriums. He talks about needing more space. The small studio at the bottom of the garden is already beginning to feel too small.

What is unlikely to change is the starting point. The work begins with listening, and with the details that remain: a song, a place, a habit, a colour. Things that might otherwise slip away.

Asked what he hopes people feel when they see the finished work, he keeps the answer simple.

“I want them to love it,” he says. “I want them to feel connected to it.”

What he makes sits somewhere between artwork and memorial, neither quite one nor the other. Not closure. Not consolation. Something quieter than that. A way of letting grief take a form that can live in a room, part of the everyday.

“It’s a celebration of life,” he says. “That’s what I always come back to.”