ART

Fluxion

issue
4
The art historical memento mori still life* genre is an inquiry into
human issues of acquisition and consumption, flesh and temporality,
loss and mortality. In the traditional still life, fruits may be visited by
flies, or flowers might be fully open and losing petals, observing and
marking passage, mutation, decay and transformation.
I play around the edges of this genre, using 20th and 21st century
methods of painting, printmaking, photography, installation, digital
images, and other materials and approaches. I have created bodies of
work where I both reference the memento mori and suggest the body.
Kitchen scraps, discarded objects, shapes, marks and glazes stand in
for skin, organs, intestines and bones.
The painted installation Incantation, pictured here, seeks to generate
a fleshy, mysterious “sacred space” from feminine forms, here an enor-
mous, velvety, labial flower, a reference to the real stuff of life: body,
fecundity, interconnection, flow.
*The French term for what we call “still life” in English is, in fact, “nature morte”—”natura morte” in Italian
and Spanish—which translate literally as “dead nature.”
Laurel Paley’s

Na
ture Morte
169