Artwork / Private Masks / James Murphy (Undertaker’s Apprentice)

painted portrait of funeral home employee
Gwenn Seemel
James Murphy (Undertaker’s Apprentice)
2005
acrylic on canvas
17 x 21 inches

We mourn.

For the exhibition of this series, I decided to try something a little different from what I’d done for Critics Critiqued and Snow Days. For each portrait in the series, I chose a sentence that described death in terms of the particular death worker portrayed. Like above, “we mourn” was painted on the wall near James’ portrait, and all the sentences made for a striking display that encourage audience members to talk about their own experiences of death and dying. I always try to make the live exhibitions of my work interesting.