This piece forms part of a recurring Vanitas theme addressed in my works concerning contemporary views on mortality, the brevity of life and human behaviour.

As with all artworks referring to the ‘Carrion King’ it addresses a fictitious deity used to personify the internal, possibly primal element, which seems to reside within most people; the part of us that is stirred to curiosity and sometimes gratification by violence and carnage. Innumerable accidents and atrocities are part of our daily lives and (fictional) death is as always a key component in various forms of entertainment, numbing us to the dismaying reality of human mortality.

This desensitising process has a dualistic character in that often it both repels and excites; it is inexplicable and often denied. The entertainment value of violence and its associations with mortality, whether fictional or real, can be seen to take on the role of appeasing this more carnal, vicarious and obscene nature and understanding within; hence the inclusion of objects relating to the viewer’s insertion into the work, such as for example a reflective surface or memento mori objects such as hair or bone. Various ceremonial, iconographic or ritualistic contexts and elements are manipulated to bring together the many aspects of this theme.

By representing subjects such as sacrifice, offering, and obsession, it portrays the symbolic feeding of internal compulsions, of both the artist and the viewers. The compositions are made up of morbid little ‘gifts’ that denote the hording/collecting of death, here in the form of small lifeless animals; creatures whose vulnerability (and fragile materiality) are akin to that of the human body. The referral to a carrion creature brings about thoughts of predation and the consumption of death itself. It is in my opinion, and from my experience, that opening oneself to the truly horrifying is in itself a sacrifice made unto this ‘Carrion King’.

The act of viewing or choosing to view that which we find most atrocious or frightful becomes the sacrifices we make; of ourselves, unto ourselves, ever feeding the unspoken need within. We immolate little pieces of ourselves to feed this unembodied thing.