Drawing the Bones
“Creation continues incesantly through the media of man. But man does not create, he discovers...originality consists in returning to the origin.”
Today I decided to draw the bone sculpture I made in Japan and mended with kintsugi in Tokyo almost two weeks ago. In fact, I am going to spend some time with this sculpture - drawing, painting, photographing, and maybe even writing love letters to it. After I made the drawing I followed my inner guidance to combine it with photographs of my grandmother Murial’s gravestone and home I visited last summer on the land where the Parrsboro River meets the Minas Basin ~ located in Awokun, Mi’kma’ki, also known as Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, which is on land that is in the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Mi’kmaq people.
Being on the land where my ancestors lived and died has had a lasting impression on me and I continue to explore the depths through the powerful and ancient symbol of bones.
I’ve become curious about death rituals in Bali, Indonesia, where I am living right now. Most Balinese Hindus cremate their dead but around 2 hours from Ubud is a remote village and home to the Bali Mula (meaning ‘original’), the island's original inhabitants, who practice a unique Trunyan funeral ritual.
Instead of burying the deceased or cremating them, villagers place the bodies on the ground, cover them with a cloth and arrange bamboo around them to form a prism, called “ancak sanji”.
They let the bodies lie under a big tree called Taru Menyan, which literally means nice smell; the enzymes from the tree and decomposing bodies mix together to neutralise any odour. The centuries-old tradition can be seen in the piles of moss green skulls and bones piled atop rocks and scattered in the thick undergrowth that surround the tree.
“All that Remains” filmed on location at Sasama River, Japan. June 2023
What is particularly interesting for me about this ritual is how boundaries between the dead and the living stretch and blur; bodies aren’t buried/burned and ‘gone’, but rather what remains, their bones, are made visible and the living and dead are encouraged to interact.
When my mom died March 4, 2016, she told me what scared her most about dying was that she would be forgotten. When I made the drawing and created the collage yesterday I couldn’t remember the last time I thought about my dad who passed away 28 years ago. If all that remains of our ancestors are the bones then maybe it does make sense to linger with them a bit longer to have continuity and a tactile way of (re)membering where we come from.
