When I was a little girl, I was most happy to sit in a corner with a book while my neighbour friend called for me to join her outside to play. My mother, ever the believer in the powers of fresh air and sunshine for her young, shooed me outside. Protests quickly forgotten, my friend and I took off into the fields, waded into ponds, swam in lakes and quarries, biked through the woods, only returning home in the fading light with a grumbling belly and a child’s conviction that summers and life will go on forever.

Growing older, I’ve remained an inside person, staying rooted in my inner world, with no mother to coax me outdoors, but with every passing winter, I grow ever more aware that summers and blissful sunshine are finite. To deal with my unease and anxiety, I turned to my craft to create, express, and finally manifest those vague thoughts and feelings.

This need to process my thoughts through art led me to a philosophy that values presence over ambition. I was never partial to “Carpe Diem’s” push for achievement. Instead, I adopt the ancient notion of “Memento Mori—remember you must die”. It encourages me to fully embrace the joyful moments and to live in the present.

This concept of Memento Mori has inspired art from ancient Greece through medieval Europe, the Victorian era, to the present day reflecting on life’s impermanence to find meaning, like Chloe Hope’s beautiful writing in her Death and Birds blog on Substack. Chloe is a death doula and devotes much of her time to a bird sanctuary. Her reflections on life’s fragility and the grace of birds in her care inspired my sculpture’s name and theme, alongside my thoughts of how many more times I might watch my favourite trees thrive in spring, bear fruit and nuts through summer and autumn, and fall dormant again in winter.

My Memento Mori is a piece of black clay and white porcelain, the duality of colours reflecting the eternal transitional movement of yin and yang, an idea expanding the individual experience of life and death within the greater context of our universe.

I began with a slab of black clay, rolled out and pressed against the plum tree outside our studio. The bark’s rugged grooves and plateaus imprinted themselves into the clay’s surface. From more black clay, I shaped a small bowl, carving a hollow to cradle the delicate forms I crafted next.

With white porcelain, I sculpted a bird skull, a feather, and a cracked eggshell. These I nestled into the bowl, which I attached to the back of the bark-impressed slab. Once the piece was leather-hard I turned it over and cut through the bark to reveal the hollow, making the egg, feather, and bird skull visible to the viewer. I fired the piece, then brushed a manganese wash over the bark’s texture and coated the porcelain with a silky white glaze. A second firing brought it to life.

This is my Memento Mori, following the long tradition of many artists before me who, delving into the darkness of death, created light through art. The black clay cradling fine white porcelain pieces serves as a poignant reminder of the brevity of life, the inevitability of death, and in between the vast potential of our aimless flight through life.

In making it, I found that there is no need to be afraid if I embrace the whole arc of existence while treasuring the most precious moments.