Memento Mori

“life and death, vivid colour and dull decay, the possibility of flight versus permanent grounding.’”

I used many photographs of feathers in extreme close-up, the beautiful wings I was sent for this assignment, a bird skeleton discovered in an abandoned building and live birds photographed in various locations, blended and merged to form a series of contradictions: life and death, vivid colour and dull decay, the possibility of flight versus permanent grounding. ‘Memento Mori’ is translated from Latin as ‘remember you must die’, and I wanted to capture a sense of this from the birds’ perspective with this work.