How to work with death

Two of my family members have died in the past year, which has made me feel completely crushed over the past month. Very bad timing, having just started uni, for me to be grieving, but it also seems to be informing my work in a way that interests me. I have been obsessed with devotional artwork, shrines and votives for a long time, and recently I discovered the decadent and ridiculous beauty that is the reliquary. I first found the reliquary of the tooth of Mary Magdalene in a book on biblical artwork that I found in the library. 

In this context, I can make sense of how I could make devotional artwork of my own. Something that I have struggled with is the idea that the work should be directional; without real devotion and worship of something, me making 'devotional' artwork is empty and in a way voyeuristic, taking inspiration from something and imitating it although it has no real meaning for me. So the idea that I could also use this form of sculpture making to incorporate my grief into my work, rather than trying to circumvent it in order to make work, makes sense to me.

Reliquaries are seen in many different cultures and religions, but most often in catholicism. I love the obscenity of worshipping the dead using their remains. It seems to me to be so in conflict with the nature of catholicism, with it's preference for concealing things and denying sensuous experiences and pleasures. It is very rare now for people to have witnessed death in it's true form, open caskets have fallen out of fashion and the body will be taken away fairly quickly after someone dies. This changing context around dead bodies makes the reliquaries even stranger. To present something that most people would find disgusting in our reserved western culture, as a divine and precious object, is so deeply subversive and strange, but it's rooted in tradition and therefor not questioned.

 The preservation of these remains becomes so important that no expense is spared in their creation, and the artist is rarely credited. I love that. It truly is very refined artwork, but not for an art audience. It is a reflection of the natural human attraction to beauty that can never be stifled, and for which there is no budget. 

Reliquary of the virgin and saints

The saint Eustace head

Arm Reliquary of the apostles

I also see the death motif reflected in the artefacts I have been making. There is something about excavation running through the work- pulling things out of the ground, or a body. Things that were once a part of something bigger and still represent that something, although now that the context has changed, they become something different, mysteriously separate from our way of life. 

Although I am not eager to admit this- because of the way that it makes me feel- the bone like objects seem to be wholly inspired by may (dead) aunt. She had a malformation in a bone in her wrist years ago in my childhood which she had surgically removed. The called is a 'ganglian' and she asked to keep it but was denied. This narrative seems to always be in the back of my mind when I am making the bones. I can't help but think of them as malformations of some animal or human skeleton. My aunt also worked with porcelain in her artwork, so it makes sense that I would be thinking of her.