Deconstructed Vanitas

I’ve been working with still life my entire creative life. It’s a genre I know intimately — not just technically, but historically and symbolically. Of all its forms, vanitas holds particular weight: a genre of allegorical still lifes rooted in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, vanitas uses transitory objects — extinguished candles, fading flowers, rotting fruit — to remind us of mortality, the futility of pleasure, and the vanity of worldly pursuits.

I wanted to look at this tradition through a contemporary lens and also think about how we remember, collect, and aestheticize impermanence. I kept the genre’s most recognizable motif — the skull — but instead of recreating a classical arrangement I rebuilt it as a counterform: my skull is filled with tiny objects. These objects echo the genre’s symbolic vocabulary — dead insects, tableware, gems, dried petals, seashells. But they are playful, brightly lit, materially eclectic.
I like to think of it as a kind of two‑step fractal: a vanitas inside a vanitas. It doesn’t spiral into infinity — just folds in once, like the genre giving itself a wink. There’s solemnity in the symbolism, but also humor — a knowing, slightly absurd approach to the aesthetics of death and decay.