2025/12/06 by Jason Danely, Katie Taylor · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Art, Politics, and Modernism #Crafts, Textile, and Design #Public Spaces through Art
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/13576275.2025.2594058
openalex created_date 2025/12/06 · openalex publication_date 2025/12/06 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
Art has a unique capacity for addressing the existential problem of the unidentified death in ways that afford the reparative possibility of care, reflection and mourning within and beyond local, directly affected communities. This essay focuses on an exhibition by UK-based artist Katie Taylor, whose work around unidentified deaths pushes the boundaries of conventional mediator deathwork. Taylor’s works—fragile bioplastic belts, gloves, and clay vessels imprinted with absent bodies—speak in the language of decomposition and resonance. Drawing on concepts of bound-up material, transitional objects, and the ethics of witnessing, we propose an expanded understanding of mediator deathwork: one that embraces not only forensic specialists and ritual practitioners, but also artists who give form to the invisible. The dialogue with anthropology draws out the ritual, aesthetic and archaeological references of the work while arguing that even in abstraction, something of the deceased still sticks to the work, allowing us to encounter them and to grieve in ways that challenge the narrative foreclosure of the archive. Through art, the unidentified dead are reimagined not as cases to be solved, but as presences to be felt—affective intermediaries who call us into uncertain, yet vital, forms of relation.