ashes to ashes_ by Noémi Szécsi

My relationship with death is about acceptance;in recent years I find the subject more intriguing and mystical. It can be sad or mysterious at the same time. In a book I read the following statement, "death gives meaning to life", this summarizes, briefly, what I feel about the concept of death. Death gives motivation; the fear of total vanquishment forces people to fulfill their desires. I think there is no greater stimulating force. Since I always find death a rich subject matter, I visited the only crematorium in Budapest. During my first visit I became aware of a sweet smell in the air that I later learned was concomitant to the furnace firing. The other thing that really caught my attention was the silent objective attitude of those who worked at this facility, who still however treated the dead with respect. This attitude I wanted to represent in my images. My encounter with prostheses started a whole new divergent path. I found them interesting because they remained the only coherent material evidence of a deceased body and its existence. When I designed these later prosthesis images, my intention was to use a more hands on creative route, not just to act as an observer and frame the dead’s prostheses natural fate, I wanted to re-envision them in specific situations using particular further materials to emphasize their now non-functional state.