Blake Prize

Depart without Return

Shoufay Derz

The work is a personal reflection on death and the meaning of emptiness. The elegiac image is both a lament on the transience of life and a celebration of its mystery. Intensely processdriven, elemental and alchemical, this work harnesses the life cycle of silk moths and pure indigo pigment. I am interested in how absence is articulated through marks of presence and how the visual artist uses the known to depict the unknown just as the writer uses workds to express the ineffable. The photograph is finished with a custom-made cedar wood frame that I stained with natural indigo pigment.