Juliana Lindell
Nature has always been an extremely important aspect of my life, so I knew it must play a role in my concentration. But instead of simply focusing on beauty in nature, a pure aspect of life, I decided to focus on death. While researching I have realized that life and death really go hand in hand. When a person is laid in their final resting place, their body is given to the earth. From death new life is created, nature and death meld into one. My sculptures represent the beauty found in this fusion.
Originally my concentration focused around the idea that death can be viewed as something beautiful, but I now realize the reason I felt so strongly about this morbid idea is because of my irrational fear of death. So in order for my subconscious to cope with the concept of death, I have depicted death as something beautiful, to show that being buried in the soil breaths new life into the earth. Each piece shows an aspect of the human body and its relation to the earth once the body is buried in the ground. Imagine flowers blooming through a rib cage (1), imagine the pure life being created from the end of another. “Bee Mine” (11) is a good example of the enlarged size of my pieces as well as the principles of design used, the silver veins emphasize the absence of life, and the oversized bees create a visually interesting rhythm within the sculpture. The majority of my pieces are much larger than life, I decided that the body parts I was creating would make more of an impact to the viewer if they were larger than life. Another good example of this would be “Hear No Evil” (7). I hope that my pieces will convey the message that death is a beautiful aspect of life.