Photogravure print from a still-life series entitled “Memento Mori” - a phrase that translates from the Latin as ‘remember that you will die’. Although it may sound morbid to our modern ears, to the ancient Greek Stoic philosophers reflecting on mortalrity was intended to invigorate life, and to create priority and meaning. They were reminded not to waste time on the trivial and vain, but instead to live each day to its fullest as if it were the last. Today, death is too depressing for our culture which desperately tries to deny it. Yet by doing so we avoid the reality of life. It would benefit us to think differently, for, as the essayist Michel de Montaigne put it, “To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”
For this series, I produced a still-life studies of ‘dead’ organic objects found on our Spanish farm and in the nearby forest: animal skulls, chestnuts, fruit, flowers and wild fungi.