Poor Souls
This work proposes an embodied viewer who approaches it with their own, personal, preoccupations and spiritual sentiments of the human condition: the - inevitable – transience that it's physicality presents.
Hand modelled using a variety of polymer clays, I looked to the traditional work of Capodimonte porcelain artisans as a basis for technique and style.
Obsessions of the spirit; contemplation on afterlives and our final resting place open wider political, cultural and religious questions. Beliefs, different to each viewer, the only certainty that one day our bodies will fade. An inevitability of our fragile nature that always returns us back into the land from which we arose. The 'Poor Souls' connect to reflect the viewers' own desires: A need for recognition and remembrance.
The flowers and foliage that engulf the skull echo the symbolic transformation of a body buried, that reproduces life and sustains our existence. The meticulous craft employed seeks not only to pause the tenuous state of nature in the height of its beauty, but to contrast that with the solidity and permanence of bones once the flesh and tissue has decomposed.
Images of the Fontanelle cemetery and the cult of the poor souls, from my native Naples, are conjured up by the dislocation and enshrining of an anonymous skull: what it can mean to be unnamed and unidentifiable, yet retain ones’ mark on the natural and social world.
Hand modelled using a variety of polymer clays, I looked to the traditional work of Capodimonte porcelain artisans as a basis for technique and style.
Obsessions of the spirit; contemplation on afterlives and our final resting place open wider political, cultural and religious questions. Beliefs, different to each viewer, the only certainty that one day our bodies will fade. An inevitability of our fragile nature that always returns us back into the land from which we arose. The 'Poor Souls' connect to reflect the viewers' own desires: A need for recognition and remembrance.
The flowers and foliage that engulf the skull echo the symbolic transformation of a body buried, that reproduces life and sustains our existence. The meticulous craft employed seeks not only to pause the tenuous state of nature in the height of its beauty, but to contrast that with the solidity and permanence of bones once the flesh and tissue has decomposed.
Images of the Fontanelle cemetery and the cult of the poor souls, from my native Naples, are conjured up by the dislocation and enshrining of an anonymous skull: what it can mean to be unnamed and unidentifiable, yet retain ones’ mark on the natural and social world.
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