At Home with Death Statement (2016 - Present)
“I see death as beautiful potential.” These wise and brave words, spoken by Kate Oberlin months before her death from cancer, serve as a guiding mantra for the At Home With Death project.
Near the end of Kate’s life, I would visit with her and her husband Deloy in their home in North Carolina. These last days were as much about listening and learning as image-making. Kate and Delroy openly and generously invited me into their vulnerable and difficult conversations about death and dying. After our talks, I would walk their large rural farm and reflect on the philosophy that Kate and Deloy had shared. Taking their wisdom to heart, I would make images that represented the meeting place of their ideas and the ones within myself that the conversations had prompted. Here, I found Kate’s body alive in the land she touched and loved.
When Kate passed away in July of 2016, her body was decorated with flowers from the property and presented in the living room of their farmhouse for a three-day home funeral. The funeral was followed by more ritual and music at Kate’s final resting place, the forensic studies department of Western Carolina University. Kate’s body was donated to the university for forensic research into alternative burial practices. Since her death, I have continued to make images at Western Carolina University, where Kate’s bones were excavated, cleaned, and archived, and at the Oberlin homestead.
This unflinching look at the natural dying process serves as a meditation on humanity’s place in a wider ecology. Kate, while deeply spiritual, did not believe in an afterlife that can be experienced by our consciousness, but believed in afterlife via entropy. Our energy disperses and is carried in the soil and in the bodies of other organisms, and in this way we become part of everything. Through the Oberlin family’s wisdom and openness, At Home With Death focuses on the healing power that can come from embracing our place in an endless cycle of death begetting life begetting death.
