Death
Model (lying on the bed): Angela Edwards.
Setting: Bristol prison/Alcatraz.
Inspiration: Angela’s performance piece “Tempting Failure”, which took place at Bristol prison in April 2013.
Death is about fear as much as endings (and new beginnings.) Angela’s performance terrified me. Being imprisoned is a huge fear for me, almost as much as death itself.
The Death card in the Tarot is not a negative card. It means the ending or passing of something that must pass. There is light at the end, and new beginnings. The sunset in the window is from the traditional Tarot card, where the sunset represents the end of the day but beginning of a new day. My skeleton (from the 1550 statue from the tomb of Rene de Chalon) is surrounded by a glowing light, showing something new to come, beyond this world.
The heart the skeleton is holding is the heart ripped out from my Hanged Man card.
Bed “12A” refers to how in hospitals there is never a bed 13. Between 12 and 14, they have 12A. Death is card 13.
The knives were part of Angela’s performance. The toilet was in the cell. I changed Bristol’s tiled walls to resemble a cell in Alcatraz because I thought that would fit the card more than tiles. The vulture eating a corpse is from a sky burial, where bodies are left out for animals to consume.
And finally… the three heads. Severed heads usually appear in the Death card. My three heads refer to a story that has always stuck in my mind: During the Algerian civil war in the early 1990s, a friend when home to visit. One morning, he opened his front door and saw the heads of three policemen. This is NOT a political statement. It is merely a memory I have included in my Tarot deck, and it is my deck and I can include what I like. Death, fear, severed heads.