The Still-Life Kit transforms your regular bowl of pears or grapes into an authentic Still-Life picture! Traditional Still-Life paintings are charged with meaning about transience of life, which is translated through the portrayal of symbolic objects filled with symbolism, such as skulls, butterflies, caterpillars, flies, maggots, sea-shells, and others, placed around flowers and food.
The Still-Life Kit takes these same symbols and turns them into pristine white porcelain objects. With the help of silver-wire, it is possible to attach these objects onto flowers and fruits and thus create a customized Still-Life into each person’s own table. Aside from the Kit, all that is needed is any bowl and whatever food there happens to be in the house. Thus, the picture created is ever-changing and transient: an apple is eaten, strawberries arrive from the market… a whole different story begins.
The purpose of the Kit is to highlight the natural beauty and intrinsic symbolism of the food which already exists. Much like Beuys used gray in his pieces in order to highlight the colour and vivaciousness of “real life,” the Kit is all in white in order to bring out the riot of the rainbow naturally present in our environment.
The Still-Life Kit includes (all in white porcelain and silver-thread): 1 baroque bowl, 2 birds, 1 caterpillar, 1 skull, 1 butterfly, 1 fly, 1 maggot, 8 different leaves, 3 different shells, 1 rat, 1 frog
