FIONA HENDERSON
Vanitas: Skulls and Flowers
Some art genres endure through cultural changes and seem eternal and the vanitas is one of these. Despite the near disappearance of the religious and cultural framework within which the vanitas was conceived, artists continue to use the tropes inherited from the genre to explore life, death and mortality. The vanitas or momento mori was conceived as a visual representation of the direction of Christian churches for its members to live life obeying God’s doctrines and thus to earn their reward in the afterlife. Candles and hourglasses were used to show time passing and remind worshippers that their mortal life was short compared to the eternal after-life. These were often paired with images of objects made from precious metals to make the point that earthly wealth was of no use after life’s short span. Food and flowers, often dead or dying, were potent symbols of the ephemeral nature of all existence and human skulls captured how short our earthly time is as well as serving as a reminder of the length of life after death.
For me, as a lapsed Christian with no belief in an afterlife, the vanitas still has a powerful message albeit the inverse of that originally intended. Today the vanitas encourages me to live life well, to remember that it is brief and, once lived, it is over. I remember to find the beauty, the joy and the contentment in the moment, to not waste time chasing material wealth beyond my needs and to value the relationships in my life.
The body of work I am showing uses images of skulls, flowers and some everyday objects. Differently from the original vanitas, my skulls were not sourced from human bodies, my flowers are not visibly dying and my objects are only precious because of their associations with people. Instead of putting the objects on a shelf I have suspended them in a void and distorted them, removing them from their quotidian existence and helping them to express ideas beyond their familiar forms.
@fionahendersonartist
