Art and death

Monday shorts

8 November 2010
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Art and death, Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, cemeteries, ceremony, funerals in other cultures, Pauper funerals

Death Ref got there first

Time was when I could tuck a story away for a slow news day and not give a thought to any other death blogger getting there first. Can’t do that any more. The story I had been saving up for today has, I see, already been aired on the excellent Death Reference Desk blog, so I suggest you pop over and read it. It’s a very good blog, DRD, run by brainy people.

Find it here.

Having found it and enjoyed it, test your powers of enjoyment by reading their latest post. Here.

Time to remember

Yup, it’s a mixed bag today. You might like to go over to Dying Matters now and see what they’re saying about Brits and remembrancing:

A survey released today has revealed that three out of four (75%) people in England do not set aside time with friends and family around this time of year to remember loved ones who have died.

Commenting on this Professor Mayur Lakhani, GP, Chair of the Dying Matters Coalition and the National Council for Palliative Care (NCPC), said:

“It is shocking that the vast majority of people in England don’t take time to remember dead loved ones. This is further compelling evidence of the wall of silence our society’s built around dying and death.”

It’s an interesting point, if not well made. Of course Brits set time aside to remember their dead, they just don’t have rituals to accompany their remembrancing, that’s the point. Actually, I’m amazed that as many as one in four do something with friends and family. What do they do, I wonder? They can’t all be grave tenders.

Full survey results here.

Gail’s marathon

I hope you’re keeping up with Gail Rubin over at her blog as she covers 31 funerals in 31 days. I thought at the outset that it would amount to a fascinating and valuable social document and that’s just how it’s panning out. She’s on #10 already.

Start here.

Bear necessities

Here’s a story I’ve been sitting on for far too long. The aftermath of Russia’s long, hot summer has left bears very hungry, it seems. So hungry that they have started wandering into graveyards and eating the tenants. “In Karelia one bear learned how to do it [open a coffin]. He then taught the others,” she added, suggesting: “They are pretty quick learners.”

Find the full story here.

Dark art

Finally, over in Dublin the painter known as Rasher is holding an exhibition entitled Womb to Tomb.

Womb to Tomb shows his darker side, which emerged when his mother Sheila was diagnosed with cancer. She died two years ago at the age of 62. Watching his mother’s health deteriorate caused a shift in his world view. “It made me think about life in a way I hadn’t before. I remember saying to myself, before this, I can’t be a controversial painter because I don’t think that’s who I am but in some ways I’ve been pushed into this.”

The first painting visible in the cramped studio is a huge work called Dead Man’s Bells . The colours, brilliant blues and pinks, and the swirling endless sky is pure Rasher. The skeleton curled in a foetal position underneath the soaring foxglove or Dead Man’s Bells as they are known in America, is something of a departure. “I like the idea that when we go to our tomb we go back into the earth and when we decompose we feed new life, flowers bloom and then bees feed off the pollen and repollinate,” he says. “I find that cycle of life very comforting.”

Just to the right of this is an alarmingly authentic pig’s head with a bunch of flowers in a glass box, a work called Embalm and Calm . Another painting on the wall is a picture of his mother who used to tell him that self-praise was no praise, all the while quietly supporting her son’s dreams. “I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to do it if it wasn’t for my mother’s death because I’d have been afraid what people would think. I don’t care any more, it’s about expressing how I feel.”

Since she died, Rasher has been preoccupied with the ephemeral, the quicksand of life, the “here today, gone tomorrow” of existence. In this exhibition, the beautiful and the rancid sit side by side, like a disgusting perfume presented in exquisite packaging. “I just see beauty and tragedy hand in hand in everything I look at,” he says. “I see flowers and I just think in the next couple of weeks they are going to die. Everything I do now seems to be a reflection of that.”

Full story in the Irish Times here.

 

 

Shovel-and-shoulder work

21 October 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, Art and death, Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, bereavement, ceremony, Children and funerals, DIY funeral, funeral customs, funeral directors, funeral poetry, Good books, green funeral, home funerals, natural burial, shroud

The words that follow are by Thomas Lynch, a hero to so many of us in the UK. (In the US there are those who reckon him paternalistic, but we don’t need to go into that. It’s complicated.)

Funerals are about the living and the dead — the talk and the traffic between them … in the face of mortality we need to stand and look, watch and wonder, listen and remember … This is what we do funerals for — not only to dispose of our dead, but to bear witness to their lives and times among us, to affirm the difference their living and dying makes among kin and community, and to provide a vehicle for the healthy expression of grief and faith, hope and wonder. The value of a funeral proceeds neither from how much we spend nor from how little. A death in the family is an existential event, not only or entirely a medical, emotional, religious or retail one.

“An act of sacred community theater,” Thomas Long calls the funeral — this “transporting” of the dead from this life to the next. “We move them to a further shore. Everyone has a part in this drama.” Long — theologian, writer, thinker and minister — speaks about the need for “a sacred text, sacred community and sacred space,” to process the deaths of “sacred persons.” The dead get to the grave or fire or tomb while the living get to the edge of a life they must learn to live without those loved ones. The transport is ritual, ceremonial, an amalgam of metaphor and reality, image and imagination, process and procession, text and scene set, script and silence, witness and participation — theater, “sacred theater,” indeed.

“Once you put a dead body in the room, you can talk about anything,” Alan Ball [creator of the HBO show Six Feet Under] wrote to me once in a note.

Source

Really getting real

18 October 2010
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, Art and death, Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, burial depth, funeral reformers, funerals in other cultures, home funerals, natural burial

When Americans decide to do things differently, it seems to me, they make a clean break. Brits, on the other hand, carry over a lot of familiar stuff from the past. I mean, how often does a natural burial ground witness a scene like this?

And which has the courage of its environmental convictions and buries at three feet?

Read the story in the Washington Post.

(Beautiful shrouds available from the UK here.)

Parish notices

11 October 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, Art and death, Attitudes to death, Books, green funeral, natural burial, Plan your own funeral

First, an event, Dying to Live.

It is organised by Archa Robinson at Living and Dying Consciously and is billed as: Suitable for anyone facing death in the next 90 yrs… a reflective, meditative, poignant, life changing and fun weekend !

Here’s more:

We live in a society conditioned to deny death. It’s a taboo subject and is often seen as a failure or at best ‘unfortunate’. We live as if we live forever, ignoring the truth of change and impermanence. Yet the acknowledgement of them holds the key to life itself. To be truly

conscious in our lives and present to each moment means to ‘let-go’—to die to the last moment and open to the next—to live and die consciously, moment to moment. Death is the ultimate ‘let-go’. From the moment of our birth our bodies are dying, so the more we face the fears of our own death the more we are able to love and celebrate our lives now.

We will use image-making, meditation, writing and other experiential ways  of exploring these themes   To support participants on their own inner journey they  will be asked to stay in silence during the workshop.

Venue: Boswedden House, Cornwall.

Dates: 12, 13 & 14 November.

Cost: £125, with an early bird fee of just £95 if you book before 22 Oct. B & B available at £96 for 3 nighsts; £70 for two. Sounds like terrific value!

Further information and booking here.

Boswedden House

Second, a survey conducted by Jean Francis, author of Time to Go and one of the team at ARKA Original Funerals.

Jean conducts workshops on funeral planning and would love you to respond to a survey she is conducting into the importance people place on environmental considerations when planning a funeral. It’ll take you less than five minutes (I know, I’ve done it myself). You’ll find it here.

One to see

4 October 2010
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Art and death, Attitudes to death, funerals in other cultures

There’s an exhibition on at Compton Verney, 13 November til 12 December, entitled Kurt Tong: In Case it Rains in Heaven. It’s a photographic celebration of the Chinese custom of burning paper consumer goods of all sorts — clothes, cars, iPods — in order to provide for the dead person in the afterlife. It’s a custom that probably makes little intuitive sense to anyone not brought up in the tradition, by which I only mean that it makes little intuitive sense to me.

As well as being a lovely place with a very good restaurant and a tradition of excellent exhibitions, Compton Verney is home to the largest single piece of stone ever taken from the Isle of Portland. It’s a boulder 5 metres high and weighs 100 tonnes. Its installation was the inspiration of artist John Frankland. They had a heck of a job getting it off the island, I remember it well, and having got it to its destination the best name Mr Frankland could find for it was ‘Untitled’, which sounds a bit like artspeak for ‘Er…”

I digress. If you’d like a foretaste of Tong’s snaps, have a look here.

The Modern Mourner

21 September 2010
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: alternative funerals, Art and death, ashes, funeral trends, Humour, memento mori, memorialisation

I wonder if you spent any time over at The Modern Mourner yesterday? If you didn’t, think again and have a gander. It is the creation of Shirley Tatum, a generous spirit who signposts her readers to all manner of more or less wonderful designers. Okay, there’s nothing quite so divisive as taste, but I’m going to nail my colours to the mast here. I love ’em.

Here’s Shirley’s manifesto: My goal is to bring a sense of design to the way we mourn. I’ve noticed how much care goes into the aesthetics of weddings and births, but there seems to be little consideration when it comes to funerals and remembrance. There are so many aspects that need to be overhauled in the funeral industry – from attitudes toward death to industry practices. Design & mourning is a little niche that I’ve chosen to focus on, and hope to make a difference.

Before long I hope she will write a guest post here.

On her site she has an interview with Patrick McNally, aka The Daily Undertaker, whom I think we all admire hugely. If you’ve never been, go now. Here’s Patrick’s response to one of Shirley’s questions:

The word “Undertaker” is actually quite beautiful, but it’s a word most Americans have come to fear. Why is that?
‘Undertaker’ originally described a person who undertook to provide funeral services and goods, not someone who takes your body under the ground, and it had a neutral connotation. However, all words that are used to describe things that we are uncomfortable with end up taking on a negative tinge. When we change the word to remove the negative feeling, though, we solve nothing other than confusing people about what we really do. ‘Mortician’ is a fancied-up job title like ‘beautician’ and Funeral Director was the next step after that, but what does that title even mean? To effect a real change we need to talk openly about death, and stop changing the words associated with it. When you say ‘Undertaker’, everyone knows what you are talking about whether they are aware of the origins of the word or not. It’s plain talk and yes, plain talk has a real beauty to it.

One of the designers and makers Shirley signposts is LBrandt Terraria, which supplies an entirely new receptacle for ashes/memento mori with a strong delight factor,  as evidenced in the pic at the top.

Memento mori

20 September 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Art and death, ashes, Attitudes to death, memento mori, memorialisation, Plan your own funeral

An interesting thread here in a US forum about the custom of stopping to show respect for a hearse passing. I don’t suppose it’s a custom to be found anywhere in Britain any more. Pity. Any reminder that the bell tolls for every single one of us can’t be a bad thing. “We slowly drove, he [Death] had no haste.” That’s the way to do it.

On the subject of reminders of our eventual demise, I rather like this over-the-top urn cover which Shirley (I hope I’ve got that right) at Modern Mourner has commissioned. She says: “I plan to keep my most precious personal possessions in it for now, and when my time comes my ashes can kept sheltered in this most stylish cover. If my ashes are scattered at some point, I hope this wrap can be used to store meaningful mementos.”

Whatever you think about Shirley’s urn cover, wouldn’t it be a good thing if everyone kept their end of life docs in a dedicated hollow object which all members of the family know all about? I’m collecting mine in a wooden ashes pyramid that I bought from Carl Marlow. It’s satisfying to point and say, “It’s all in there.”