Dying Traditions

Sammanfattning: Within a year I lost three close family members. My grandfather, my grandmother and my stepfather. Three very different deaths and therefore very different mourning periods were entangled and intertwined. Death suddenly became a ubiquitous part of my life, and the sorrow an overshadowing part of my everyday. This period in my life became the starting point for my thesis 'Dying Traditions'. In todays Western Society we have become so good at prolonging life, that most people get to live a long life and die of old age. But the advancements in medical science have, together with the institutionalization, removed death from our daily life. We are no longer in contact with death aside from what we see through media and movies. We are missing a way of coping with the natural death, which makes it difficult to grasp and surrounds it with a taboo. With my work I want to facilitate a conversation surrounding death. By the use of contemporary jewellery and silversmithing work I want to place the conversation and presence of death in both the public, private and personal space. I want to create a starting point for new rituals to work through a mourning period. I make use of my own personal experiences as a starting point to create contemporary Memento Mori objects fitting for todays Northern European Society.