The light of day is sweet
30 March 2010
A project about transience, in which over a hundred individuals from different parts of the world completed a short questionnaire on:
- the participants’ visual association of death
- their feelings and thoughts about their own mortality
- how the individuals would like to be remembered
Based on the answers to the questionnaire, I made a sculpture A Memorial to the Living for the exhibition Here Today, Gone Tomorrow as part of the Bath Fringe Arts Festival in May/June 2010. The responses to the question on visual association have also inspired a series of small paintings.
I would like to thank all the individuals who took part in this project.
A memorial to the living
The sculpture is 2.2m high. In the centre is a slideshow of over 100 slides on how the individual participants in the project would like to be remembered, with original photographic work as background. The names of the participants are also inscribed on stones and shells. Details of the individuals are used in the artwork only with the consent of the participants.
The choice of materials for the sculpture (wood, stone and shells) and of the images used in the slides (landscape, plants, animals) highlights the fact that we are part of nature and mortality is natural. However, by using a variety of colourful images in the slides, the slideshow conveys the richness and diversity of life and renders this “memorial” a celebration of living.
