Portfolio: Still Life and Death at Harvard

When walking through the meticulous arrangements of a modern natural history museum, it is easy to forget what a vast necropolis we are navigating. Harvard University’s archive alone contains 21 million animal specimens, only a fraction of which are on public display. In my MFA thesis series, Still Life and Death at Harvard, I exhume these bodies from their drawers and basement cabinets, to examine not what they have to teach us about science, but about ourselves and about the institutions that have collected them. The ubiquitous tags attached to legs, ears, and wings speak to our human drive to categorize, to create hierarchies, to name and to own. The preservation of bodies themselves prompts a meditation on mortality, our fascination with what remains after beings cease to be. By rendering these bodies in paint, I create a space to mourn our own dead (those we have already lost, and those we have yet to lose), to whisper their names, and to embrace both the beauty and horror of our impermanence.