Memento Mori

These Memento Mori photographs are a contemporary take on the Sixteenth century Flemish painting movement - Vanitas. The decaying subject matter symbolizes the ephemeral nature of life and the certainty of death. The photographs pay homage to the many species that have been pushed to the margins by the human population’s expansion and exploitation of the planet. To make these images I find road kill and other dead mammals, insects and birds to use as the subject matter for my still-life photographs. I arrange these specimens with the local vegetation of the region. These images attempt to memorialize the life of these animals, similar to 19th Century American ‘mourning portraiture’.