Sky Burial
How can beauty, strength and grace be inextricably paired with violence, fragility and destruction? Apparent contradictions happen everywhere in Nature. They happen within ourselves. Sky Burial gives form to the human experience of paradox. It exemplifies a state in which a plurality of opposing qualities and forces exist within the same circumference. In essence, two become one.
The title of the work references a Tibetan funerary practice in which a deceased person’s body is placed on a mountaintop to be eaten by carrion birds and other scavenging animals. The ritual, in addition to its practical function, is considered an act of generosity in which food is offered to living beings, and the cycle of life and death is brought to completion.