Life Writing & Death: Dialogues of the Dead. Creative Section

Oriri ex cinere

Authors

  • Spring Hurlbut Georgia Sherman Projects

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.9.36914

Abstract

In Oriri ex cinere (rising from the ashes), artist Spring Hurlbut recounts the inspiration and process behind the photographic and video work she has created using cremated human and animal ashes. Hurlbut’s lines, quadrilaterals and circles of ash have an integrity of form that keeps them whole and intact, and another force that dissipates their structure, suggestive of the dissolution that ultimately affects all living forms. Her video, Airborne, shows ashes of named individuals emerging from black boxes and riding the air currents in a dance involving the movements of the living and the vestiges of the dead. Hurlbut draws attention to the reality of death that is generally cloistered in our society. Through her activation of human and animal ashes, she gives the dead a chance to engage once again with life.

Author Biography

Spring Hurlbut, Georgia Sherman Projects

Spring Hurlbut is a visual artist based in Toronto, Canada. She has been involved with questions of mortality and reverence, transcending the barrier between the living and the dead. Hurlbut has work in the collections of Departement de la Seine-Saint-Denis, France, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the National Gallery of Canada, and was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2018. She has exhibited widely, including at PS1, Long Island City, the Morgan Library, New York, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and C/O Berlin in Germany.

Published

2020-07-06

Issue

Vol. 9 (2020): EJLW

Section

Life Writing & Death: Dialogues of the Dead. Creative Section

Copyright (c) 2020 Spring Hurlbut

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  • Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  • Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  • Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.