IF YOU CAN'T LIVE RESPONSIBLY, THEN AT LEAST DIE RESPONSIBLY
I like to think of my work as a reflection of my mind – chaotic, cluttered and occasionally insightful.
Given the status of our planet in 2023 – the ever rising threat of climate change and our global polluters effectively putting their fingers in their ears and singing really loudly, I was surprised that I was surprised that the industry of death is contributing to the polluting of our environment.
They say there’s two things certain in life – death and taxes. If you’re in either business, you’re unlikely to run out of work. However, in the Western world, we’re oddly squeamish about life’s biggest certainty (note: it’s not taxes.)
It may be why we don’t talk about the environmental responsibilities of dying.
Toxic chemicals from the embalming, burial, and cremation process leach into the air and soil, and expose funeral workers to potential hazards. And maintaining the crisp, green memorial plots is extremely land-and-water-use heavy. Source: Business Insider
The embalming process makes corpses appear sleeping, removing the uncomfortable realities of death itself. But what is death, other than an inevitable end of the body and a return to the Earth? For some reason, these are facts we deny, along with the other ‘ugly’ truths of our lives; illness, ageing and the realities of childbirth are glossed over for mass consumption, cleaned up like our dead. We are so afraid of confronting reality and speaking the truth, we are sanitizing our end – at the expense of our Earth.
Over 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde based embalming fluid are buried in cemeteries in the US alone every year – and for what? We live polluting, at the very least, can we not surrender our bodies back to where we once came?
As a medium, mixed-media collage means as an artist, I am able to express myself with both images and words, with texture and colour (or the lack of.) I often find my poetry revisits the themes of death and decay, although the source thoughts often change. For this piece, it wasn’t a metaphor, more a question as to why we fail to be honest about birth, death and all in between. With the rise of AI art, we are continuing to sanitise our existence and leave ourselves soulless. Art has always, at its core, been about honesty, raw and exposed, our souls continuing throughout the ages, preserved in words and images. This is how we live forever, rotten and forever returning to the Earth from whence we came.