How Dead Things Became My Love Language
Toni Morrison wrote that "Birth, life, and death — each took place on the hidden side of a leaf." That line pretty much sums up my artwork.
My fascination with nature is not limited to the things that are typically considered beautiful. I am absolutely in love with lush green growth, living creatures, things that are thriving, and at the same time, I find myself drawn to study closely the things that are no longer alive. Both pull at me equally, and I've come to understand that this is not a contradiction.
“Traveling Companion #1” one of my collected pipevine swallowtail butterflies featured in a tiny artwork.
One of the first times I encountered a pipevine swallowtail butterfly, it was at the end of its life, no longer able to fly, crawling slowly on the ground. It was completely at ease being picked up and held in my hand. Knowing it was at the end of its cycle, it felt right to bring it home. It may have been one of my first collected specimens, though I can't say for certain. Flying creatures – especially butterflies and moths - that have already completed their lives are the ones I can collect and bring home with a clear conscience, treasuring the beauty of their wings without any conflict.
There is so much to be learned from things that are no longer alive, and we can study them closely without any worry of causing harm. Autumn leaves, in their dying, are often more beautiful than the green ones still on the tree; their slow decay actually deepens their beauty. I've found it is far easier to study and photograph a creature that has already passed than a living one, and that practical reality was, in some ways, where it all began. But alongside the practical, there was always the beauty. It's remarkable how many times a fallen creature has a quiet loveliness to it, a stillness, a form revealed.
“Sleeping Beauty” my memorial for a Western gray squirrel.
One Western gray squirrel I found was quite lovely, less common than its invasive eastern cousins, and I felt the weight of that as I brought it home and photographed it. I was memorializing it. Isolated against a clean backdrop, it became even more beautiful than it had been lying in the grass. I was assisted in that particular collection, I should mention, by a kindred spirit, an anatomy professor who shares my love and appreciation for the natural world.
There is something about documenting the full circle of life that makes my love of nature feel more complete and more honest. There is beauty not only in a brilliantly colored leaf, but in the lacey decay of an old dry one. And these things, these fallen, fading, finished things, carry a message that artists and people of faith have understood for centuries.
Memento mori. Remember that you will die. It is not a message of fear but of attention. How long does a small bird live? A squirrel? A year or two, perhaps. How much more precious, then, is that life, present only for a moment? How much more worthy of our notice is that flower, knowing it will be gone in two days? Death and decay carry an urgency that is not about dread but about appreciation, an invitation to receive the beauty of the whole cycle, including its ending.
Vanitas, the related artistic tradition, takes this further, reflecting on the fleeting nature of earthly pleasures and the brevity of material wealth. Together, memento mori and vanitas form a centuries-old conversation about what it means to be alive and finite, and what that finitude asks of us.
A seed becoming a plant is itself a story of death giving birth to life. A flower blooms fully, then folds back on itself, dies back, and in doing so produces the seed that carries new life forward. The dandelion opens again so its tiny seeds can float away on the wind and give rise to new flowers. We cannot have new life without the old life giving itself away. That is simply how the world works.
It is also very much a part of my faith. The overall narrative of Scripture is built on exactly this cycle: the burst of creation, the failings of humankind, and a sacrificial death that makes way for new life and renewal. It is played out in the natural world over and over again, at every scale, in every season. I have become fascinated with all of its stages, which inevitably includes the ones that happen on the hidden side of a leaf.
I am drawn to all of it, the blooming and the fading, the flying and the fallen. Not because I dwell on endings, but because the endings are what make the rest of it matter. That is what I am trying to say with my work. That is what the natural world has been saying all along.
