Recently deceased persons were meticulously posed and made to look as if they were alive. ![]() The art “memento mori,” needless to say, flourished during the Victorian era. These post-mortem photos are called “memento mori”, which is the Latin phrase for “remember that you will die.” Families valued these post-mortem photographed portraits as treasured keepsakes and precious remembrances of their dead loved ones. ![]() It was not uncommon for Victorian-era families to pose for photographs alongside with their recently deceased loved ones. And because of the long exposure, the dead – especially children and infants – were often the most preferred subjects for making photographed portraitures. It is due to the fact that it could take up to about 15 minutes to develop an exposure. Not to mention it was expensive, as it was laborious and time-consuming. Photography was still a novel medium and a form of art way back then. A fifth of the children born at that time would not be able to reach five years of age. The average lifespan during the Victorian era was only about 40 years – if you lived past those years, you would have been lucky. According to author Robert Hirsche in his publication Seizing the Light: a Social History of Photography: “death occurred in the home and was quite an ordinary part of life.” Incurable diseases, poverty, poor sanitation, and miserable housing conditions crippled people way back then. This is not unusual, as death was all around them. ![]() Not surprisingly, people embraced death and the stark reality of it. Yet even in our modern culture and society, death is still considered as a taboo subject – it is discussed only when necessary, and even so, people talk about it in a hushed manner.īut during the 19 th century – especially in the Victorian era – death seemed to be commonplace. Famous people or not, no one is spared from it. Many years later I went on to wear the piece at the first of an ongoing series of all-black banquets held every two years and entitled 'Dine with Death.Death is an inevitable part of life. It is formed from rotting Victorian jet, skulls, and a pair of huge talons. It is an all-black feast featuring 'Turtle soup, Russian rye bread, ripe olives from Turkey, caviare, mullet botargo, black puddings from Frankfurt, game served in sauces the colour of liquorice and boot-polish, truffle jellies, chocolate creams, plum-puddings and black heart cherries.' I imagined myself a guest at the feast and created the necklace as a suitable adornment. In the novel there is a description of an extravagant dinner that the hero holds to mourn the temporary loss of his virility. "The 'Memento Mori' necklace was inspired by À Rebours. ![]() Each one is inscribed by hand, not with the clinical nomenculture of the collecter/amateur but with the subjective introspection of the romantic. The pronounced Gothic aspect of his work is underscored by the carefully crafted boxes in which his pieces are presented. Unlike Damien Hirst's laboratory-like presentation of antiseptic carcasses, Costin's pieces have a fetishistic and totemic allusiveness. His use of taxidermy, seemingly retrieved from some obsessional collector's cabinet, and his incorporation of materials evocative of the late Victorian cult of mourning are poised between poetic morbidity and necromantic glamour. Simon Costin's work reflects his interest in decadent literature of the late nineteenth century.
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