Death is not here. Death is everywhere

In Death is not here, Wouter Van de Voorde joins his children in a search for rocks, fossils and the meaning of life. It’s a book where symbols of life and death, the old and the new mix with ravens, ravines, and sculptures made out of stone.

There’s an acknowledgement at the back of Death is not here. ‘This not death was created on the unceded lands of the Indigenous Ngunnawal people, the First Nation and traditional custodians of the Canberra, Australia region. Ngunnawal have cared for this Country, its waters, rocks, plants, birds, animals, peoples and spirits for at least 20,000 years…’ it begins.

It’s an acknowledgement that sums up the book, its subject matter, and the time-span it seeks to encapsulate. It opens with a series of images of a man walking through a ravine. He uses a ladder. He goes back to his house. The earth follows him. It trails into the house leaving a streak of mud behind. We see his son playing in muddy puddles and walking through the bush, there is a raven and then a mysterious circular hole (the digging of which may have been one of Van de Voorde’s pandemic pastimes) which is lit by a ring of fire.

There is a flurry of ravens, funereal curtains, what looks like a threadbare cockatoo, a deceased chicken, and then we are back in the family home, an arm outstretched against a giant clamshell, and a woman, presumably Van de Voorde’s partner, nestling a baby.

Time shifts as we move from the geological realm to the domestic, but it also merges, the family home with the distorted swings of its domestic time becoming one with the geological time referenced throughout.

In this sense, the work shares something with Jon Cazenave’s Galerna, a book where geological, meteorological, and human time all work together. Or possibly Morganna Magee’s Extraordinary Experiences, a book published earlier this year that also looks at the Australian landscape ‘as a world that is in and of itself, that has a power to both give life and take it away, that is a site of eternal growth and decay.’

With earth, fire, and ravens that feast on the bodies of dead kangaroos, entropy is at the heart of the book, a continual disintegration that feeds on itself until it eventually, like the fire around the hole Van de Voorde dug, flickers its last fame and fades into blackness.

Against all this, there is another backdrop; the pandemic, and this creates another layer of time, one which merges with the sculptures Van de Voorde makes from his fossil collection.  The sculptures become more playful as the book progresses, and are shaped into forms that look like dinosaur nests (complete with a chicken egg), petrified forests, troglodytes, and neolithic tombs.

“A peculiar convergence of death/life and permanence/impermanence occurred during the period I made these images. 'Death is not here' is a personal time capsule capturing and preserving this time in my life,” says Van de Voorde about the book.

And that is exactly what it does, but the time capsule he has created preserves multiple times both in his life and beyond; times where the geological, the colonial,  the domestic, and the pandemic merge in a manner that combines the profound and the playful.

 

 

 

 

Death is not here is published by

Void

22 x 27,5 cm

160 Pages

750 copies

Softcover with dustjacket

Wouter Van de Voorde is a Belgian-born, Australia-based visual artist. He lives with his family on Ngunnawal land in Canberra, Australia. 

Colin Pantall is a photographer, writer and lecturer based in Bath, England. His latest book, Sofa Portraits is available here.  Follow him on Instagram.