Memento Mori
I’ve always been quite preoccupied w/ death. I spent a good 5-6 years of my pre/early teen years incredibly preoccupied with my own. I was a pretty severely depressed girl. I held loaded guns to my head, I sliced my arms with razors & broken glass, I cried a lot. I didn’t want to be here. I was afraid to ask my parents for help, terrified of making my dad angry, really. And then when I was 16, he took his own life. Turns out, we had both been suffering, together yet utterly & completely alone; oblivious to each other in the same house.
Suddenly, someone close to me had died & my fascination with death and & mortal fearlessness only grew. I begun communicating with my dad in dreams. The dreams stopped eventually, & I have spent the last 20ish years wondering if that was really him, talking to me in that infinite void, that bright light obliterating everything. But my interest & acceptance of death persisted. It’s always there, just waiting for all of us. This knowing, helps to ensure I live my life with as little regret as possible.
About 15 years ago I stumbled into an antique store in Colorado Springs, & they had just acquired many new items from a local estate sale. I made a bee line for a stack of old photos I saw. They were really old portraits from a studio in Denver. They’re all signed by the person in the photo. I can only guess that the photographer made it a habit of keeping a copy of all of the photos be shot. I had no idea what I was going to do with them, but I loved them so I bought them. They have now traveled with me to 4 different homes in 3 different cities. I assume all of the people in these photos have since died & I think I’ve finally decided what to do with them.
A memento mori is a an object serving as a warning or reminder of death. It can be anything. Last fall I took a @morbidanatomy class w/ @joannaebenstein called Make Your Own Memento Mori. Mine was a box with a moon made from bone on the lid, & artifacts from the beings closest to me who have passed on on one side, & artifacts from those closest to me who are still living on the other; my dad’s pipe & a lock of my daughter’s hair respectively, for instance.
I want to turn all of these precious photos of humans who once existed into memento mori. Because I grew up in southern NM, heavily immersed in Mexican culture, I have always respected and been enamored by it, especially the culture’s embrace of death. So I suppose these art pieces should actually be called Memento los Muertos: an ask that we remember our dead and a reminder that we will also die one day. Both keep us grateful, grounded and humble.
These are are designed, engraved, mounted on gold foil and framed using vintage/antique store frames and absolutely contain a tiny piece of my own soul.
