WEEK 7: HOSTED BY NATALIE MORTIMER

An online conversation between students of the BA Fine Art and MArt courses at Sheffield Hallam University.

Begun at 9.00PM on Monday November 24th.

Hosted by Natalie Mortimer, on the subject of death and the familiar, with reference to Death and the Enlightenment by John McManners, Western Attitudes Towards Death From the Middle Ages to the Present by Philip Aries, and Art & Obscenity by Kerstin Mey.

In attendance: Luke Chapman, Jamie Crewe, Luke Dilnot, Daniel Fogarty, Jonny Fox, Zuzana Godalova, Luiza Holub, Pippa Lennox, Natalie Mortimer, Sarah Smizz

TRANSCRIPT:
http://www.box.net/shared/cjdd2xiob2

POSTSCRIPT:

Madeleine Walton

Thanks for the transcript. These are my thoughts

1. Dead people do not look like themselves. I saw my Dad and my mum
after they died in the funeral parlour and they both looked
completely different. What stays with me is the smell. I can still
smell that horrendous smell from two years ago.

2. The current life expectancy for a British male is 81 and 85 for a
female. For you guys who are in your twenties your life expectancy
will be even higher. I think the issue isn't about life it is about
quality of life. My father's final five years were hell as he had
Alzheimers.

3. My mother was brought up as a catholic and she taught me and my
brothers and sisters divine retribution through the bonker fairies.
The bonker fairies were all knowing, all powerful fairies who watched
our every move. If you did something wrong they punished you. So if I
fell over and cut my knee and went to my mum, she would say, 'what
did you do wrong earlier today because the bonker fairies are
punishing you'. I still worry about those bonker fairies and I admit
I have told my own children about them.

4. On a lighter note I read on the back of a toilet door evoking 'I
think therefore I am', 'I'm pink therefore I am spam.'

Madeleine


Tim Thorpe

Sorry I missed last night. Nat, the subject is one of great interest to me. I'm interested in the role of objects in the process of grieving, the role of memory and objects and the way the consumerist nature of modern society is counteracting the investment we make in objects.

We deny death in our society, not spiritually, but by sanitising; removing it to another place. At the same time it is dramatised in mass media to reinforce a sense of unreality or superficiality. We have become obsessed by recording ourselves and others. From the photograph to the moving image, the process of recording is creating a record of the past in the present. We, in our turn, are becoming increasingly challenged in our capacity to live in the moment.

The dead take up residence in our psyche; they are ghosts within us. We are living crypts of the dead. The objects of the dead can be a symbol of absence, invested with "sacred status" and the representation of the pain of grieving. This may dissipate with time; the custodian of the object is complicit in the conituation of this secret life.

At some point we will not be part of living memory. We will cease to be a memory trace or embodied effect in the lives of the living. We will simply disappear into oblivion.

"We die twice, once physically and the second time in the heart of those who love us" (Victor Hugo).

Tim

RESOURCES:

http://www.box.net/shared/k50tf3bn5f