To start off the posts on this blog (created in order to maintain thought process and development during my MA Fine Art course) I will introduce my work and the concepts behind it.
I have always been fascinated by rituals in some way or form and likewise my work has always taken an interest in both psychology and death. The way that I see death is a natural occurrence where the person who was born of the earth is returned to it and the circle of life and death continues down it’s path. While a death is always emotionally painful, society should embrace it’s occurrence as being something natural and harmonious. Society as it stands consistently regulates death to the extent that the subject is rarely approached and verges on denial. In some cases deaths are seen as a failure of medicine and in most a “tragedy”. My work will reflect on traditional funeral rituals, look at how death is handled in different cultures and show how natural and beautiful the event actually is, putting the event into a positive environment and challenging people’s way of thinking about it.
During my research about this I have also been discovering processes and methods of casting in which to create “death masks” (a popular traditional ritual in some cultures) which has led to me thinking about how I can show ritual and also disintegration using the life casting. Hopefully after I have learnt all I can about the processes I can look at making wax models and other degrading materials in order to make parts of the body and think about how to show these in a ritualistic way.
Here are some images of my first sessions in life casting…
