'Woman Dead' and 'Coffin 1' by Grace Lau

Befriending death – Grace Lau’s coffin portraits

Sean O’Shea reflects on Grace Lau’s coffin portraits which were included amongst a selection of works featured in the mixed media exhibition Telling Stories held at Hastings Museum back in Sept 2012.

 Grace has exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain, and Brighton Museum. Her book Adults in Wonderland: A Retrospective, 1997 is available from Amazon Books.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

 The Tempest, W Shakespeare

For her death portraits Grace Lau got living people to lie in a coffin wearing clothes of their choice and carrying a valued object for their journey. These photographs are at once tender, mundane and humane. They emphasise the fragility of human existence temporarily suspended as it is between the finite and the infinite.

The woman holding a bottle of red wine to her breast is evocative of the Madonna and child of Christian iconography. The carpenter clutching the tools of his trade is easy to imagine as someone who once stood erect, distinguished and proud of his craft, but is here represented as merging again with the wood chippings and sawdust from whence he came.

One of the merits of these photographic portraits is that, rather than attempting to shock us while keeping us at a safe distance from our own mortality, the artist succeeds in drawing us in by inviting us to befriend a subject which is still taboo and, for some, a cause of  much fear and terror.

The Victorians liked to photograph corpses in their coffins all dressed up in their Sunday best,  and the Americans are partial to radical makeovers of their cadavers which seems to deny the fact of death altogether. And some folk in the US seem to have such enthusiasm for life that they are driven at considerable expense to deposit their remains in frozen compartments in the hope that, with the advancement of medical science, they may one day be safely resuscitated. Freud was no denier of death; he called the act of love la petite mort, the little death and gave special place in his metapsychology to Thanatos, the death instinct, which he regarded as being in perpetual struggle with Eros, the life instinct.

Nowadays we like to keep death at a hygienic distance. Our wars are becoming increasingly more efficient as modern weaponry ‘services targets’ and minimises ‘collateral damage’. Death is an aesthetic object to be observed in the safe confines of an art gallery, a challenge for the mortician’s cosmetic talents, or an event to be interminably postponed by medical intervention in the impersonal environs of a hospital ward.

As the resources of medical technology are exhausted and physicians confess their limits, the patient is reluctantly released. Some of us these days might prefer to be allowed to depart with dignity in familiar company, and at a time and place of our own choosing.

Funerary literature

Guidance on the experience of dying remains a somewhat peripheral concern in medical practice though this attitude is slowly changing. Help with dying is left to the ministrations of alternative therapies, depth psychologies and the religious traditions. Classic Christian texts dealing with this subject include Erasmus’s De Praeparatione Ad Mortem 1533, and Jeremy Taylor’s Rules & Exercises of Holy Dying 1651. From a Buddhist perspective there is the much older Tibetan Book of the Dead which dates back to the eight century AD and which, judging by current sales figures, remains a popular resource.

Previous cultures have perhaps been wiser in their appreciation of the continuity between life and death. In times past friends and relatives cared for the dead and the deceased were not hidden away from the community and bundled into places of special confinement. Furthermore during Festivals of the Dead, usually held at the beginning of winter when the boundary between time present and the hereafter was viewed as most permeable, a place was commonly set aside at the feasting tables for the souls of the departed – a gesture of hospitality well worth reviving and extending to living strangers.

More about Grace’s work can be found at:

http://tellingstories.info/home/artists/grace-lau/

The Telling Stories Exhibition was reviewed by HOT reporter Lauris Morgan-Griffiths’ on 28^th September 2012

SOS June 2013

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