Go Singing to the Grave
Still Life with Raccoon Skull and Cicada
They live underground, in darkness.
For 13 years, 17 years, the cicadas remain dormant, deep beneath the earth, waiting. They emerge from their burrows only in their final weeks, to find each other, to fuck, to die. In art the cicada often represents personal growth, transformation, renewal. In art we often focus on the creature’s triumphant emergence from hiding, matured, fully realized.
Less attention is paid to the state that occupies most of the cicada’s life: the dormant phase.
The long wait.
The years in darkness.
We don’t like to think about how that time was spent.
For years they wait in darkness.
Some will die there, never having left the dirt that will, eventually, reclaim their bodies.
But some will rise, some will come out singing their shrill song, a sharp droning buzz that seems impossibly loud. When I find their carcasses in the fall it’s hard to believe that such a tiny husk could roar like that.
Some rise from the long wait in darkness and, when they come, they come out singing.
And they go singing to the grave.
Still Life with Raccoon Skull and Cicada
This pair of images use the same few elements — the racoon skull, human teeth, dead plant materials, and a dead cicada — to explore themes of renewal, hibernation, and looming death. These are ideas that have been on my mind quite a lot of late, for all the obvious reasons.
In this diptych the raccoon head stands in for death, it looms over both arrangements, occupying a central focal point in each composition. And in both cases I have included a dead cicada; however, the placement of the cicada is chosen to represent two very different possible approaches to the long hibernation we have all had imposed upon us.
In the first image, the cicada is trapped in the raccoon’s jaws. Here our protagonist has been consumed by the looming threat; she has not survived her long period of quiescence.
In the second image I tried to offer a more hopeful interpretation of these key elements. Here the cicada is placed as far from the looming threat has possible. In this composition the cicada is placed on a fairly stable point, in stark contrast with all the other elements in the scene which are precarious and unstable. Here our protagonist has emerged from her long period hibernation and, although the spectre of death still looms over her — as it always will loom over us all — she has survived long enough to share her song with the world.