This series is my personal Memento mori—a reflection on how our creative imagination helps us accept death, which is always present within life.
Autumn leaves and algae drifting on the river created asymmetrical compositions—natural ikebana—whose lives are fleeting. The flowing water and wind constantly transformed them, revealing the quiet acceptance of life’s natural rhythm, in which death is an inevitable part. Literally translated, ikebana means "the second life of cut flowers." It is rooted in the search for harmony between opposing forces: balance and tension, form and emptiness, life and death. Nothing is permanent, complete, or perfect. We cannot discard any moment from our experience, even if it seems flawed. But we can trust that everything changes with time. Where there is an end, there is always a beginning. Where there is death, there will always be life.
At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the energy of death pulled me into its abyss. Psychologists advised drawing lines—mental boundaries—between life and death. That’s how the Found Ikebana series was born: images of dead leaves on living water. It turned out that human imagination is stronger—death retreated.
Our imagination protects us when it gives us hope to move forward—and through that, life is affirmed. Our purposes, dreams, and the meanings we create—though they may be illusions—are tools of the instinct for self-preservation. They help us accept death and, at the same time, encourage us to live.
Cicero says that contemplation draw our souls somewhat outside ourselves, keeping them occupied away from the body, a state which both resembles death and which forms a kind of apprenticeship for it; or perhaps because all the wisdom and argument in the world eventually comes down to one conclusion; which is to teach us not to be afraid of dying.