1994

Memento Mori (L. remember death; remember that you must die): Anything serving as a reminder, warning or souvenir of death.

Expressions of death are often found throughout history in the form of body adornment; from eary cultures’ use of amulets and charms to the development of mourning jewellery from the Middle Ages through to its widesprerad popularity in the 19th century. Some of this jewellery, often inscribed with latin legends, was not ony worn during mourning but also as an everyday reminder of one’s inevitable death.

The works in this series relate to these traditional themes of death in jewellery and stem from a personal need to provide a ritual for mourning the deaths that surround my life. The materials, blackened silver and pearls, have been used as an historical reference to the traditional materials found in mourning jewellery. The aesthetic reference to anatomical imagery is a continuing theme from my previous work, establishing a direct visual relationship between jewellery and the human form. In a world of pandemic disease, these contemporary jewelsrepresent the process of death through illness. Memento Mori attempts to satisfy the primal human need for understanding death as part of life itself.