Still life is a series of photographs and stereoscopes, which straddles the divide between the heart breaking seriousness and the utter absurdity of mortality.
Roland Barthes talks about the ‘perverse confusion’ in photography, that between two concepts: the real and the live, by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive.
Artificial flowers share that same perverse confusion, and when they’re used to adorn graves and sites of mourning, which is where the flowers in the images were sourced, that perverse nature comes into sharper relief.
A nod, both aesthetically and symbolically, to the 17th century pronkenstilleven and vanitas paintings, these still life photographs and stereoscopes also explore the nature of vanity in the old sense - the meaninglessness of life and transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits.
In a more contemporary sense it also taps into the general mood of apathetic nihilism which currently permeates pop culture and is born from oversaturation of impending Armageddon - global warming, ISIS, persecution of asylum seekers and politics both nationally and internationally.