‘She Died Twice’

‘She Died Twice’ is a sculpture dedicated to my grandmother, a real fighter in life, who actually died twice. After she died the first time, my sister (a cardiologist) brought her back to life with a heart massage and a lot of dedication. After a few hours she passed away again. You can’t keep what’s not yours to keep. This is the feeling I wanted to depict choosing a bottle of a ‘Happy Joe’ as the container of my grandmother’s ‘spirit’. The cap on the bottle represents our futile attempts to keep the soul in (like a genie in a bottle).

The bottle is fairly widely represented in art and popular culture. It is associated with loneliness, pain, trying to connect (message in a bottle), etc. The shape of a bottle follows the human form, it has shoulders, neck and sometimes a head (the bottle cap). When the bottle gets open (cap is removed), hell breaks loose and you might ‘lose your head’. It’s not a coincidence that alcohol is also called spirit, and it evaporates once the cap is open, or the head - ‘lost’. Same is valid for perfume (hence the perfume shaped cap). We call the soul ‘the essence’ of the body. And essence is a synonym of fragrance. This contradicts the depiction of a rotting body as a perfume bottle. The viewer can’t help but imagine the stench coming out when removing the cap. When the essence has left, the rest gets subjected to physics lows. It’s the defeat that makes us feel uneasy looking at the rotting body in the morgue. The only thing we can achieve is to rationalize the cause of death. And write down its time...

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