Death & the Maiden

  • Art is Not About Pretty Things

    Art is Not About Pretty Things

    Artist Sara Lucas challenges us to see the transience in beauty. Three years on from her breast cancer diagnosis she reflects on the moment her priorities changed. A few fashion magazines and marker pens later she felt alive. After all, we’re all going to die anyway, pretty or not!

  • Maiden’s Bloom: The Art of Emilia Olsen

    Maiden’s Bloom: The Art of Emilia Olsen

    Olsen’s faceless maidens, with their pink, sun-kissed flesh, confront their mortality and heartbreak with the age-old symbol of vanitas – a grinning, bleached skull. Much like Persephone dragging the lush flora down with her descent into Hades, Olsen’s subjects embrace the darkest part of their ego within a state of botanic euphoria.

  • Dead Good Gifts For 2017

    Dead Good Gifts For 2017

    This year we have some of our favorites back…

  • Iris Schieferstein’s Death and The Maiden

    Iris Schieferstein’s Death and The Maiden

    Gabriella Daris met German sculptor and taxidermy artist, Iris Schieferstein, at her studio—43km outside of Berlin, by the Langer See (Long Lake)— where she encountered giant freezers filled with carcases— major raw materials for the artist’s work.

  • Best of 2016

    The subject of women and death continued to make frequent headlines this year, as well as issues concerning gender, identity and death, reproductive rights and an examination of our complex and ever-changing relationship to our own mortality. Here’s a recap of what 2016 had to offer from our co-founder Sarah Chavez.

  • Dead Good Gifts 2016

    It’s that time of year. Some of us will be sitting back with a smug sense of achievement, whilst others pretending they have plenty of time. Here at Death and the Maiden we have complied our annual list of wondrous deathly fem gifts. There should be plenty of inspiration for your last minute dash and…

  • Death & the Maidens: Why Women Are Working With Death

    Death & the Maiden’s co-founder, Sarah Chavez, delves into the reasons underlying the current interest many women seem to have with death, and the rise of the Death Positive movement. Exploring a question persistently asked and rooted at the very core of Death & the Maiden: Why are so many women currently interested in death and…

  • The Light Witch

    Photographer Courtney Brooke creates a haunting visual poetry rich in the feminine ties to nature & spirituality. Her images capture a beautifully bleak moment through stunning landscape in a dream like world. With influences such as witchcraft, the romantics, mother earth and death, Brooke explores what it is to exist in a human form.

  • Deathly Maidens

    Film maker Wesley Chambers shares his top five “Death and the Maiden” films with us. These are not only must see movies but also the masterpieces that influenced his latest film Ligatures. You can watch Wesley’s short film by following the link and find yourself on a seductively surreal journey with two deathly maidens.

  • Skeletons & Young Girls

    Even today, Death and the Maiden, depicted together, have lost nothing of their morbid and unsettling charm. And they still speak to the most hidden part of our souls; on one hand reminding us of the fleeting nature of the body, but suggesting on the other hand that there’s a secret complicity between beauty and…

  • A Lady Undertaker: 1912

    In 1912 an American “Lady Undertaker” addresses the question of why women are especially suited to work with the dead.

  • Bringing Franz Fieldler Back to Life

    It’s a strangely sweet and innocent romance that is portrayed between them. Is the woman kneeling at the skeleton’s feet pleading with him, or in loving adoration? Are those boney arms of death tightly wrapped around the nude maiden’s flesh done so in a passionate embrace of lust and longing, or aggressive entrapment? Who is…

  • Fears, Hopes & Dreams

    Grief and loss are a natural part of life, but we can never estimate the impact it will have on our day to day lives, it walks with us every day. When people truly disrupt our lives in both positive and negative ways they are never forgotten, they grow with us and shape us. I…

  • Until Death Us Do Part

    My Death and the Maiden pieces are little love poems about what might happen to the non-physical “us” after we die. I like to think of the best parts of us  – LOVE – persisting when our meat and bones are no more.

  • The Corpse Brides

    If death is most often anthropomorphised into a foreboding, grinning male does it not make sense that his companion is female? The current ‘trend’ for women in the death industry is not a trend, then, but merely an influx of women taking their rightful place back at death’s side and, once again, becoming the guardians…

  • Death Under Glass

    The presence of a microscope in the morgue or the office of a forensic scientist seems to be a symbol to impress upon audiences the seriousness of the science being performed in that episode. But viewers are never shown “the pathologist’s view of the world”, so to speak – exactly what does the doctor see…

  • Death, Sex, Religion and the Erotic Women

    Death, Sex, Religion and the Erotic Women

    Dr Christina Welch explains that Europe has had a long history with Sex and Death, one intimately tied to religion. This post explores a genre of art produced during this time period that melds these themes. It examines ‘Death and the Maiden’ artworks by Germanic proto-and early-Reformist artists who highlighted the folly, futility and transience of…

  • Women in the Mourning

    Women in the Mourning

    Author of The Undertaker’s Daughter, Kate Mayfield is here to take us back in time. A time when women were not public figures in the funeral industry but played important roles ‘behind the scenes’ at her father’s funeral home, Kate’s childhood home.

  • Death has a voice

    S Elizabeth has created this beautiful playlist of women  who have constructed and composed aural memento mori exclusively for Death & the Maiden. As humans, we occupy a unique place in the saga of mortality, and these women in particular offer illuminating perspectives on the subject as it relates to the afterlife, funerals & wakes,…

  • Launch Giveaway

    We are delighted to announce our first post this coming Monday will be from the wonderful Kate Mayfield, author of The Undertaker’s Daughter!

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