Bring Out Your Dead: Design, Death, and the Human Condition on Display

By Eleanor Shippen

Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence. — George Eliot, Adam Bede, 1859

Death was a thematic and material fixture of my time in England. My preoccupation with looking for the influence of death on British design and observing how it was expressed across different object classes, exhibitions, and regions during our trip was inspired by a framed document tucked away within the collections of the Winterthur Museum.

This print features an etched border replete with symbolic and textual depictions of death. A swag at the print’s center, positioned neatly between a skeleton and a human representation of time, offers space for customization. Between mourners, cherubs, sarcophagi, and memento mori warnings to “be also ye ready” and “Remember Death / Improve Time,” the print invites whoever reads it to “attend the Corpse of Mrs. Margaretta Susanna Burnside” at her funeral at a parish church in Lewisham on May 2, 1801.¹ Details of her life and burial, such as the location of her house, were significant to her community’s spatial and interpersonal relations. The graphic elements surrounding this information are equally important as iconography reflecting broader cultural attitudes and visual shorthand in Georgian England regarding death, memory, and spirituality.

These observations informed my understanding of the design and display of other funerary objects at heritage institutions we visited. Headstones, sarcophagi, funerary hatchments, memorial plaques, and paintings depicting mourning practices were abundant during our travels. I observed and documented these material expressions of human mediation, celebration, and memorialization of death in nearly 150 of my photographs from the trip. The objects spanned temporal, spatial, and cultural contexts, however, throughlines in their design and their sources of design inspiration were present. Many of the objects, similar to the invitation to Mrs. Burnside’s funeral, featured crowded assemblages of funerary imagery, references to pre-existing ornamentation and design influences, language reflecting cultural conceptions of death, and seemingly antithetical pairings of subjects such as the religious and secular or the personal and the collective. 

The 1577 Hardwick family table-tomb located in Leeds Minister and Cradle to Grave, a contemporary art installation by the group Pharmacopoeia at the British Museum’s exhibit Living and Dying, exemplify this visual density and mediation of the personal with the collective in their depictions of death. Painted Hardwick family members kneel within a small visual field featuring family crests and a forward-facing, smiling skull, reminding visitors to the family’s tomb of their common mortality. Cradle to Grave creates a tapestry of pills documenting the medicine taken by a man and a woman over the course of their lives; dentures, baby photographs, and death certificates lining the piece make personal the anonymous, ubiquitous pills.²

While these objects reconcile the public with the individual, funerary monuments at the Roman Baths add another dimension to navigating the religious and the secular. The gravestone of Mercatilla, found in Bath’s Aquae Sulis, introduces her to fellow “spirits of the departed” and records the people and institutions she interacted with as a slave and “freedwoman and foster daughter” during her one year of life.³ Comparable in memorializing and recording the life of the dead is the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in Postman’s Park in London. Ceramic plaques detail the names and the altruistic actions of Londoners from the late nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries. Later plaques draw upon ornamentation present in earlier iterations, and similarly feature flowers, flames, and urns, common imagery associated with death.

British funerary objects employ dense visual vocabularies and layered symbolism to create spaces where private grief can intersect with public memory and where individual stories contribute to collective understanding. While these objects span thousands of years, hundreds of kilometers, and many materials and mediums, they are united through their interconnected elements of design, their status as evidence of humans creatively reckoning with death, and their continued resonance with us today.

1. Jennifer Walter (Author of object description), EMu File 2002.0045.001, Winterthur Museum, accessed January 12, 2025. ↩︎
2. Liz Lee and Suzie Freeman, “Pharmacopoeia: Illness Narratives,” British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 87, no. 8 (2021): 3069–3074. [Click the article title to access this article!] ↩︎
3. “RIB 162. Funerary inscription for Mercatilla,” Roman Inscriptions of Britain, 2024. [Click the title to access this website!] ↩︎