Yesterday I told you about the forthcoming exhibition in Birmingham ( Saying the Unsayable). Here is some backgroung to the piece of work taken from the Introduction to the programme guide written by Pauline Smith Saying the unsayable: Opening a dialogue about living, dying and death The Exhibition guide Acknowledgments […]
Saying the Unsayable
Posted on by James Woodward
This is a project that I had some involvement with in the early stages of its birth last year. Put the dates in your diary and be prepared to have your horizons enlarged! More on the project and its images later…..
When did you last talk about death?
Posted on by James Woodward
The British don’t talk about death, says a survey, because they fear it. So if you are going to have a chat about, for want of a better word, dying, how might it go? It’s got to be the party pooper to end them all: “Hi. What’s your name? What do you do? Do you […]
Art and Death
Posted on by James Woodward
This highly sensitive and beautifully written book looks closely at the way contemporary Western artists negotiate death, both as personal experience and in the wider community. Townsend discusses but moves beyond the ‘spectacle of death’ in work by artists such as Damien Hirst to see how mortality – in particular the experience of other […]
On living for today
Posted on by James Woodward
Now that death seems not so far away, I whisper to myself how much I want to hold the knowledge in my heart and hear that life itself can be enough – its beauty and its awesomeness as well as deepest tragedy. I do not want the need to seek an offer, or […]
Seeing Death?
Posted on by James Woodward
Swimming in a sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir by David Rieff, (Simon & Schuster) 2008, £12.99 Unfortunately I have had recent experience of my father and his brush with his mortality. A serious blood clot carried him off into hospital where, thankfully, at the age of 70, the doctors were able to correct this […]
Learning to Die
Posted on by James Woodward
It is at this stage that most of us discard the flowers – they are no longer of any use. But look more closely – can you see the beauty and the depth in the sheer fragility? Tenderness and perception make people attractive and humane – not the outward show of material achievement or […]