I was interested in the morgue as a space, and found it reminiscent as a manifestation of the danse macabre - an allegory personifying death. Perhaps this curiosity was due in part by studying forensics in college. I found poetry in the relics and instruments within the space as they quietly lay after performing, or participating in the final chaotic interaction between the living and the dead. It was through making this work where I was introduced to the idea of the institutionalization of death - what you see is an artifact and no longer that person. Like a snake sheds its skin, the body is a vessel left behind and the person has gone into another possible otherworldly existence. In contemporary culture, a veil has been created to distance ourselves between the living, and where death has become institutionalized, sanitized and impersonal.

However, while making this work, I realized this distance was in fact contiguous when you experience the loss of those you once knew, and the physical state in which they exist now.

Van Dyke, 6”x6”, Handmadebook 1/5 ed.