AJ Hawkins on "Art and Death"

Continuing with our series on “Art and Death”, please enjoy our conversation with artist AJ Hawkins about how changing relationships to faith can change our relationships to grief and grieving processes, how the death of a beloved pet inspired a search to make sense of her own mortality, the necrobiome as a "microbiological afterlife", her project "The Reclamation", How Death Positivity includes issues like bodily autonomy and environmentalism, how art can be used to connect and communicate, and to cope with things that feel "too big", and a crash course on ecological disposition.

AJ Hawkins uses fine art as a research medium to explore the challenges of living in a mortal body. Drawing on her background as a painter, sculptor and custom fabricator, AJ often creates hybrid art works that blur the lines between 2- and 3-dimensional, traditional and experimental.

Her Kickstarter-funded project, The Reclamation, challenges viewers to choose more environmentally-friendly afterlives by highlighting the value of human decomposition and the necrobiome. In years since, AJ's art has focused on experiences surrounding grief and illness. Her new series, The Poisoned Body, explores the physical and psychological toll of living with a prolonged and severe iatrogenic disease.

J Simmz on "Art and Death"

Sending out our second episode in the “Art and Death” segment to you all on Halloween (as is only fitting). This conversation with J Simmz delves into our personal and larger societal relationships with death, Simmz work as an intuitive and conceptual curator, how she has found ways to move naturally with cycles of life and death in work and beyond, and how we might apply that philosophy to our current state—the possible deaths of our own harmful institutions—and what our might our roles at this moment in time be.

“J. Simmz is an independent curator, writer, and researcher based in Ridgewood, Queens. She is director and curator of Doppelgänger Projects, an independent curatorial venture promoting distinctly alternative perspectives while focusing on practices of aesthetics, feminism, technology, and the esoteric within the emerging contemporary art landscape. Previously, she was Assistant Curator for g a macura inc., during which she managed GE's corporate collection. Jennifer holds her M.S. in Arts Administration from Boston University and obtained her B.A. from New York University in Art History.”

Carrie Redway on "Art and Death"

Autumn is traditionally a season for harvest, and then a season to witness the cycle of death. Our own Halloween in the United States (also known as All Hallow’s Eve and All Saints Day), began as Lemuria , an ancient Roman feast day to banish malevolent spirits. The Incan month which corresponds with our November, Ayamarca, roughly translates to “festival of the dead”. Samhain, is a festival at the end of harvest season, believed to be largely Celtic in origin, in which ancient burial mounds were opened as portals to the world of Death, and most of us have heard of Dia de Los Muertos, a Mexican celebration of one’s ancestors who have died (mostly due to the cultural appropriation of my fellow white women who think painting their faces like a sugar skull is “cute”)—the aforementioned list names just a few of the multitude of ways that humans have celebrated and observed the “dying” of the year and its relation to our own mortality.

In art, death has always been a popular subject, from the abundance of Memento Mori, Danse Macabre, and Death and the Maiden motifs, as well as hundreds of scenes of battle and war, such as Guernica (1937 oil painting on canvas by Pablo Picasso), to famous historical deaths like The Death of Marat (1793 painting by Jacques-Louis David). This segment of Critical Bounds features conversations with artists, writers, and curators, whose work delves into death, sometimes in unexpected ways.

For the first episode of our “Art and Death” segment, we welcome Carrie Redway. “Carrie Redway is a writer, mixed media artist and death doula in Seattle, WA. Her work is inspired by myth, folklore, ritual. Carrie aspires to create community spaces and tools for death education and exploration through writing and art. She facilitates epoch: a writing circle exploring death in nature and cycles. She is the author of the chapbook "Vulpecula", a conversation in poetry with the constellation Vulpecula about death and grief in various forms. She is currently working on a zine series on death topics. Her work has been published in various online and print journals such as Moonchild Magazine, Occulum, Rust + Moth, Spilled Milk, and Really System, among others.”

We discuss Carrie’s chapbook "Vulpecula" (which she reads from), find out just What IS a Death Doula?, and Carrie's path to becoming one. We talk about her connection with her grandmother through her childhood zines about death, Tips for people caring for dying loved ones in person and via distance, A Sacred Passing organization and training communities to do the work that our ancestors used to do, the invisibility of death in our (predominantly Western) culture, and movement as a tool for both grieving and creative processes.