Skin coffin

As a continuation of the work that I’d done in the previous semester with the work “Autopsy,” I wanted to look into the different ways death impacts us during our lives. While I explored a literal depiction of my own future death, and the way that I wanted to see how my health issues in life would appear in my flesh upon death, I am now curious about how death itself becomes a part of us during life. With this semester project, I chose to make a coffin—something which, when looking at my proposal and reasoning for the last semester, I swore I wouldn’t do—for its significance in representing death without being physical death. Coffins are associated with the fanfare around death; the aspects which are for the living to not feel so hopeless upon the passing of a loved one; for the belief that they will be comfortable in their long rest when they no longer have nerves firing to feel. 

The mixing of flesh and coffin will relate the physical to the metaphorical; does an empty coffin made of a body still have a body within it? Coffins help us sterilize death, turning it away from what it is in its most basic form. When we die, it becomes a primary trait in our remembrance, so why must it be cleansed and shied away from? Viewing it less as a taboo and more as a matter of fact, getting up close and personal with it, accepting that we will be there one day as a necessary part of living, I believe could help us cope with it as opposed to ignoring it.