‘Vanitas / As for man, his days are as grass’. An installation for Sørlandets Kunstmuseum (now Kunstsilo), Kristiansand 2005/06.
Double bed, wall and floor covered with clay and grass seeds and watered, 324 x 240 x 240 cm.
Vanitas was part of the exhibition Room by Room in Sørlandets Kunstmuseum 03.12.05 – 29.01.06 with Olafur Eliasson, Mona Hatoum, Ole Jørgen Ness, Sam Taylor Wood, Tore Lyngseth, Snorre Ytterstad, Kurt Johannessen, Jadwiga Podowska, Bjarne Melgård and Barbro Raen Thomassen.
Vanitas is the latin root for vanity. ‘Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, […] All is vanity’. How to express a modern Vanitas? You might have come across some of the 17th century Baroque European Vanitas paintings. They are still lives with beautiful roses, tulips and anemones, but there are always some petals falling off; fresh fruit, but with a half rotten apple or pear among them. Sometimes there is a skull, an hour glass, a light burning down or a book turned to its last page. These paintings were moral reminders, Memento Moris: remember you will die one day. Your life is not eternal, so live wisely.
I woke up one Sunday morning in my bed. I was all of a sudden acutely aware of the basic fact of lying in my bed. It struck me how a great part of life is related to our bed. Most of us are conceived in a bed. We are born in a bed. We spend all nights, sometimes days also – if unwell – in bed. And we normally die in a bed. The bed thus can be seen as a symbol of the life cycle.
Barbro Raen Thomassen