Larnaxes:
Since 2015 after the death of my parents I have been working on a long series about death. Even experiencing death from the ”outside“ that force runs through you and transforms not only the person who died but everything around that person .
Thinking of death as a transformation I started to research vessels where the transformation of the body was done inside the vessel. That is how I found the larnaxes.
A Larnax is a chest, usually of terra cotta and often ornamented, that was used in ancient Greece especially as a sepulchral chest. This type of vessel interests me because the body gets “transformed” inside.
Exploring an object’s shape, structure, materiality and how the interior connects or relates to the exterior, my “larnaxes” are vessels supported by a structural base (material world) organically shaped like human organs (natural world) and they hold a space where something was transformed (metaphysical world) trying to reveal the ontological relationship between life , death and the body.
This work was shown as “vessels are never empty” in march 2019 at Frank gallery in Vancouver.
Ceramic, wood and acrylic
32” x 48” x 74”
march 2019