Arts Thread

As a child I often stayed with my grandparents. They had an old bookcase filled with books and one shelf with fossils and bones. The mammoth tooth especially caught my eye as a child. It was a fist-sized brown jagged piece of bone. I could fantasize endlessly about what kind of mammoth that tooth must have belonged to. Not only bones but also the story behind them has always kept me busy. The story of life and death. Something I became more and more aware of. Today, death is a taboo. That we will all die is inevitable, but that doesn't mean you should avoid the subject. I want to make people more aware of their own mortality and raise the taboo surrounding death. Death has a heavy, incomprehensible and sad side, but it is also part of life. It can relieve, soften, give peace or give meaning to life. When death becomes more discussed and visible, this taboo can be broken. Death is simply there, so let it be there in all its appearances and contradictions. I have expressed the normalization of death through a poem and translated it into sculptures. In my work I use contrasting materials. Think of concrete, wool and metal. I also use positive and negative forms to indicate that something has been in the past or still remains in the present. These aspects are reflected in the following poem: Take a deep breath. Can you feel the crackle? 206 pieces in the body and they are off white Let all these pieces of minerals Weigh down or soften the emptiness Let them turn deep black like soot That gives off when it turns to ash Let the skeleton become a home For all that lives or will live And when time will unravel your skeleton Know that you are no more But still exist 12 breaths during this poem What if this was your last So breathe