title: Memento Mori: A Personal Story of Impermanance
Creators: name: Greenshields, Barbara
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2005
Subjects: subject: Mortality
subject: consciousness
subject: sentience
subject: impermanence
subject: transmogrification
subject: organic destiny

description: My project reflects upon our body's impermanence and our efforts to balance the enormity of the concept of mortality with living every day. It investigates the condition of being that one cannot permit oneself to know too often, that is, the condition of, inhabiting a body through which one engages meaningfully with the world as a conscious being, but aware that this body will die. Within this framework, I investigate concepts of consciousness, sentience, and impermanence. These are concepts that are not clearly delineated in experience. There is a need to grasp them by means of other concepts that are understood in clearer terms. Using the quotidian experiences of food preparation, eating and the domestic as metaphorical tools, I delve into these themes. As I worked with these ideas the wider possibilities, both material and conceptual became evident. I expanded the initial medium of food to encompass personal objects and daily bodily processes in my attempt to probe complicated feelings about the impermanence of my own body. The project matured into a closer examination of what could be read as signs in every day life, of my body's vulnerability to death. The specific areas of focus are: Skin, Reanimation of the inanimate, Mouth, Concepts of the internal, Organs, Offal, Transmogrification, Organic destiny. Beginning with the skin that we are encased in, I used my body as an armature to produce a facsimile of my own hollowed-out empty skin. In Reanimation of the inanimate, I explore the continuum from preserved food to fermented food investigating the development from food as organic material whose life had passed to food as organic material in which change is an indicator of ongoing life. In the section titled Mouth, I consider the concept of exploring the world with one's mouth and the notion of anti-food. Introduced in Concepts of the internal are three investigations of the internal human body: anatomical illustrations from the sixteenth century, a cinematic portrayal from 1966 that has included in its subtext a spiritual journey, and a current project in which the internal human body is seen as purely scientific data. In Organs I investigate the idea of ingesting 'properties of character' that can be culturally associated with internal organs and the possibility that such characteristics could permeate the person ingesting them. In the section titled Offal, I propose that the polarity of life and death inherent in food is most evident when eating a meal of offal. In Transmogrificaation, I consider the conundrum of my internal organs, that is, they are mine in fact they are 'me' and at the same time they are foreign to me. In this section, I also investigate the concept of my body as a conduit with the ability to transport and transform matter. Finally, in Organic destiny I posit the notion that as bodies we are an ongoing process, an accumulation of matter built up over time and that we are small participants in a much bigger phenomenon.