Threads

Based on the conversations we have had together about this brief, we all have very different  ideas and interests. I don't know how to tie these ideas together so I thought I would put down in brief what I make of it so far.

• I'm very interested in texture and colour and have been experimenting with different visual styles. I'm conscious of trying to work in a different way than I would normally, although I have to draw to begin with otherwise I have no language. I decided to draw using fabrics to see where that would take me. Looking at Quilters and textile artists who use their craft as a way of telling a story and recording history aswell as an art form, I've started to experiment with needle felting and trying to use that as a form of drawing. 
• I am hoping to speak to a funeral director next week to ask questions about what preferences people have for death rituals and if he can see a shift in the style of funerals in the future. In the west, we live in an increasingly athiest society. Has this led to new forms of ritual and closure to death. Humanist funerals are becoming popular, where woodland burials replace the traditional cemetery.  He'll never be out of a job, but how will his job be in the future.What happens to all the ashes from cremations? are they composted, used in glazes for pottery, used in micro technology?  
• We were talking when we were in Brompton Rd about using Audio to tell us something about the person buried. This led me on to researching 'Tyne Cot' cemetery in Belgium which is the First world war grave commemorating the Battle of Passchendale. Along the driveway entering the cemetery are underground speakers which recite on a continous loop the names of every soldier buried  in the cemetery. I know someone who has visited this cemetery and described the audio as a moving and chilling reminder of all the men who died there.
• Joon's research into the tobacco boxes I thought could be related to a new design for a coffin. How would each of us four design our own coffin and what kind of ritual or passage for closure would we like to have performed. Buried in the ground, cremated, made into a synthetic diamond, made into a computer chip, glazed on to a pot, shot up into the sky in a firework???
•  I was interested in May's research  about the body as chemical compounds and again looking into the world of fabric, starting looking at techniques of dyeing. Would we use our bodies, reduced into separate chemical compounds to dye a piece of fabric that we could then make into a quilt or garment and wear as a memorial to our loved one.
•  Do we make too much of death as ritual?

In this excert from T. S. Elliot's poem The Waste Land, he is talking about the fact that it is by the unknowable things that we define ourselves, but they are private to us - and not revealed in paraphernalia and memorials of death.

Datta: What have we given?
My friend, blood shaking from my heart
The awful daring of a moments's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to found on our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms.

• The Emilene Pankhurst material is very interesting, but I don't know if we can tie that into the 'New Architecture for Death' path that we seem to be on. 

So, to conclude, I can begin to see how some of these threads may come together as a presentation. We just need to get our act together and do it...