By In 2018 we showcased some incredible death positive artists. Since then, we’ve discovered more amazing artists whose work inspires us. We hope that their work will inspire you as well!
A special thanks to Ayatana’s Biophelium Science School for the Arts for sharing the work of their alumni from their MORTEM workshop.
More Death Positive Artists You Should Know
Self-portrait Mia van Leeuwen, 2020
Sun Yaun and Peng Yu
Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are Chinese conceptual artists whose work has a reputation for being confrontational and provocative. They have lived and worked collaboratively in Beijing since the late 1990s, and create pieces that dive deep into human nature, psychology, and political life. We are particularly impressed by their exploration of death and grief through sculpture, including this installation titled If I Died, which depicts Peng Yu’s mother placed among dozens and dozens of animals, representing her visions of the afterlife.
Follow their work here.
Teresa Margolles
Teresa Margolles is a conceptual artist, photographer, videographer, and performance artist who focuses on the social causes and consequences of death. Margolles communicates observations from morgues in Mexico City, and morgues located elsewhere in Latin America. Margolles also focuses on the extended emotional distress and social consequences that occur as a product of death by murder. While working around the topic of the body, her work extends to the families of the victims, the remaining living bodies that witness the death of a loved one.
The primary medium of her work comes from the morgues themselves, which she transforms into sensory experiences that provoke a feeling of memory in the audience. Margolles finds it particularly remarkable how the activity inside the morgues reflects the truth from the outside. For example, in Mexico City, the majority of victims of violence belong to the lower classes.
Learn more about them here.
Alan Syliboy
Alan Syliboy is a Mi’kmaq artist using ancestral storytelling in his work as a visual and musical artist.
His paintings are inspired by petroglyphs written on rock. In an interview with CBC about his idea for a documentary exploring Mi’kmaw death traditions, he said “Death is always there. If you try to ignore it or not, it’s still always there, and in Mi’kmaq society, death is not covered or hidden. When you’re a child, you’re aware of it.”
Follow their work here.
Julia Soboleva
Julia Soboleva is a Latvian born, UK based mix-media artist. Her process involves painting and collage on found photographic imagery. Meditating on the themes of madness and reality, Soboleva constructs mysterious narratives with ominous overtones and absurd humour. Born and raised in a post-war, Soboleva tries to find her own place against the complicated past of her nation. Soboleva explores the notions of family, taboo and transgenerational trauma in her work.
Follow their work here.
Mekan Tome
Meka Tome utilizes experimental photographic techniques to challenge our perceptions and encourage introspection. Inspired by the ephemeral nature of organic life, her work features transient materials that mirror the fleeting nature of human experience. These organic forms are often juxtaposed against minimalist industrial structures, alluding to the isolation that stems from humanity’s self-imposed estrangement from other forms of life. By employing non-archival photographs, Tome’s work confronts the human desire to preserve ourselves in a system inherently destined for decay.
Follow their work here.
Jean Jamieson-Hanes
Jean’s mind is consumed by death, particularly the deaths of those society deems less important.
“We often forget that we are animals, and that all animals are individuals. Almost everyone encounters unrecognized sites of grief throughout their daily lives; forgotten and faded bodies transitioning from life to death on asphalt. Countless lives are extinguished at the hands of humans every day, road-killed animals being perhaps some of the most visually obvious yet the most often erased. We live, intrinsically intertwined in our shared emotional geographies, with non-human animals. Yet we often wish to omit them mentally from our field of impact, unwilling to emotionally invest in their lives and deaths.”
Follow their work here.
Bea Haines
Inspired by encounters between forensic science and the domestic environment, Bea’s work explores our relationship with everyday matter and the insight this gives into human desire, fear and mortality.
As a multidisciplinary artist, subject matter often becomes art material and past artworks are made of lime scale, human ash, gallstones, fingerprint powder and blood. Obsessive repetition often creates a swarm-like effect, giving the illusion that the artwork has taken on a life of its own and is uncontrollably self-replicating and taking over.
Follow their work here.
Mia Star van Leeuwen
“In an increasingly secularized society, many of us no longer know how to perform rituals surrounding death and loss. As artists, we can understand how rituals and ceremony are created and how they function. Ritual provides a structure for, and formalizes emotional experience. Like a performance, rituals have a set sequence of actions involving words, objects and gestures that are performed in a significant order of revelation. Furthermore, artists are known to subvert the norms, imagine possible worlds, give voice to marginalized perspectives, offer alternative ways of seeing, and reframe contemporary discourse. Therefore, what can the artist contribute to the conversation and practices surrounding death, dying and memorial rites?” Source.
Follow their work here.
Genna Howard
Genna Howard is a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and tattooer born and raised in Manhattan, New York. She pursues painting as a way to process emotions surrounding anxiety and mortality, and as a way to draw herself closer to understanding what it means to inhabit the world we live in.
Her influences come from natural history, death practices in different historical cultures, and a deep curiosity with how humans connect and interact with one another. Whether it’s an obsession with John James Audubon, a self-gathered library of symbology catalogues and cemetery imagery, or an expansive knowledge of American folk art and its intersections with tattoo history, Genna strives to link these various interests within her work, making art that speaks to her own experiences in an emotional and thought provoking way.
Follow their work here.
Ava P Christl
Ava’s work, spanning over 30 years, lies at the intersection of art and ecology, nature and spirit. Ava makes paintings about nature and place; nature as healer; and about our human relationships to the living land. Their work deals with landscape and memory; grief, loss and recovery; longing and belonging; and the concept of entropy as it relates to land and water.
“I now want to shift and deepen this work to include the human landscape; to work with people in all conditions; to address grief and loss on a human scale. I have recently studied to become a death doula, and have witnessed and mourned many deaths among family and friends in recent years including death by suicide. Now, I am interested in finding ways to bring my artwork into the realm of the dying and the dead. I want to shift ideas of grief, loss, and mourning from the ecological context to the human. I want more than prayer and ritual. I want a palpable, visible expression of death and dying – an art of mourning and honouring.” – Source
Follow their work here.
Francisco Abril and Nuria Velasco
Francisco Abril and Nuria Velasco are the artists behind the surreal work of welderwings, which creates digital collages that have dark undertones.
“We love surrealism, especially the one that is darker, weirder, gothic but we never forget that even within the strangest you can always find beauty and enjoyment of the senses.”
Follow their work here.
Sonia Bazar
Sonia Bazar is a Montreal-based artist and photographer. Her latest photography and poetry book, Pathways, explores the physical and emotional space of Montreal’s oldest Jewish cemetery, The Back River. Using the framework of Sheila Clark’s grief map, poems move through different stages of grieving while focusing on the history of the cemetery and rituals of Jewish mourning. Bazar continues to research the many hidden stories of the Back River Cemetery, combining the personal and historical, to create curiosity for this crumbling monument to Jewish life and death in Montreal.
Follow their work here.
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