Death Love Art at Shoalhaven Regional Gallery examined how artists and communities have represented grief, mortality, attachment and remembrance across very different periods.
Curated by Max Dingle, the exhibition combined historical objects with modern and contemporary art borrowed from major Australian institutions and private collections.
From funerary portraiture to contemporary art
The exhibition ranged from first-century BC Egyptian funerary portraits to the death mask of Australian bushranger Ned Kelly.
Alongside these historical objects were works by artists including Tony Albert, Vernon Ah Kee, Maree Clarke, Juan Davila, Joy Hester, Sally Morgan, Sidney Nolan, Jason Wing, Jiang Zhi and Salvatore Zofrea.
Painting, sculpture, literature and multimedia installation were used to approach death not as a single theme but as a condition around which memory, identity and love are repeatedly reorganised.
Art as a language for difficult experience
The exhibition’s broad chronology allowed different cultural approaches to mortality to appear beside one another.
Some works addressed death directly through memorial objects or images of loss. Others approached it through relationships, consciousness or the persistence of memory.
A performance by Steel City Strings, drawn from the programme Body & Soul, extended the exhibition into music and reflected on consciousness, grief and the idea of a life force.
Death Love Art used this mixture of historical artefact and contemporary practice to show how art repeatedly becomes a means of giving form to experiences that are otherwise difficult to articulate.