Yates Gallery: The Kunstkammer of Death

Tchelitchew was a Surrealist artist who became interested in Andreas Vasalius, the Flemish anatomist, physician and author who made anatomical drawings in the 1500s. Vasalius’s drawings of the human body showed the veins through a transparent layer of skin. Tchelitchew recreates this imagery, but adds a sense of spirit to the figure by depicting light pulsing out from the head. By avoiding the head-on stare which was traditional in memento mori and vanitas skulls, he does not invite the viewer to face his own mortality, but rather to simply think about the marvel of the human body in its living state.

This painted memento mori recreates a scene that was not uncommon in European churches. Officials collected bones of the dead from earlier burials and gathered them together in rooms to make space for new burials. Seeing skulls in slightly different stages of decay, as depicted on the two sides of this panel, would not have been unheard of.

This architectural fragment contrasts life and death, placing the skull and bones in the center and the cluster of fruits and flowers at the right and left edges. Skulls are a common motif on English tomb monuments, often combined with cherubs, another image linking life with death.

This headhunter's trophy reminds us that European notions of death are not universal. It reminded its original audience of the strength and success of a warrior rather than their own mortality. These trophies were preserved and displayed in morungs (youth dormitories) to inspire young men as they trained to be warriors: the number collected brought prestige to the tribe.

In this creation, Jodie Carey revisits the Dance of Death theme for the contemporary audience. The chandelier would fit into a grand building, but the plaster-cast bones hold no glory, reminding the viewer that the rich and the mighty meet the same fate as ordinary people. This modern reinterpretation of the vanitas theme shows how potent this idea remains in our own time