VANITAS

Vanitas draws on the still-life tradition in which skulls and flowers bring beauty into contact with impermanence. The work translates that historical language into a sculptural mask: a face suspended between vitality and remains.

A pale skull occupies the centre of the black field. Dried botanical matter and flowers in warm tones gather around it, while fang-like forms extend its anatomy into an imagined creature. The composition holds bloom and decay in the same frame without resolving their tension.

The face is formed in plaster and worked by hand with professional cosmetic makeup. A material made for temporary transformation becomes a lasting sculptural gesture, while the shadow-box preserves the encounter as a contemporary memento mori.