To Serve the Living offers the chance to pause and consider themes relating to death and mortality. The project acknowledges our mortality, offering a space to gaze at the unseen and examine a taboo subject. The title of the work arose in conversation with a funeral director who noted that their job is focused on those left behind – that they are there to serve the living.

Many of the practices related to death now take place behind closed doors, hidden from sight, estranging us from this natural part of the life cycle. Along side pictures taken in funeral homes, morgues and crematoriums, personal grief is explored through a series of experimental photograms made using graveside flowers. These works are offered as a study of grief and show personal responses to loss, continuing the memento mori tradition of still life, they hover on the border of figurative and abstract, much like grief itself.