If the relentless rise of the beauty industry tells us anything, it’s that we have an insatiable appetite for preserving our bodies. Though it is not just a cultural phenomenon; artists have long been fascinated with the eternal, non-corrupting flesh that withstands the binds of time – and apparently, now so more than ever.
The practice of preserving the dead was first recorded in Egypt, in 3200 B.C., for resurrection purposes. Embalming was also recorded in several mediaeval texts, such as in the Troy Book (c. 1412-1420), which notes that the embalmed body appeared “Lifly visible”, and “as freshe as any rose new”.
To have your dead body preserved was a privilege usually reserved for saints and priests. The body of Saint Rita, which was famously “incorruptible”, was embalmed in the 1700s and can still be found in an open casket in Cascia, Italy. Enshrined within the political rhetoric of the tomb, and the rites of reverence that circulate it, Saint Rita and her “sweet smelling” body are forever immortalised; a symbol of the holiness of corporeal continuity. The practice of embalming articulates the immense cultural values of beauty and youth. Friedrich Kittler reminds us that the “realm of the dead is as extensive as […] the transmission capabilities of a given culture”.
Today, embalming is performed by replacing the fluids in the body with formaldehyde; though its ultimate preoccupation with an immortlisation of flesh remains the same. The corpse carries immense symbolic meaning, as does the flesh; poet Akilah Oliver refers to it as: “the closest thing we have to manifesting the divine”.
The act of embalming metaphorically continues the cultural obsession with preserving youth and remaining eternal, aesthetically and digitally. Social media functions as a kind of embalmment in itself, preserving a body that is constantly changing and moving towards inevitable death and decay. As communicated through the embalmment of holy figures, sacred flesh does not rot, and so our rituals of preservation, beauty rites, skincare routines and online posting, become our own acts of consecration and immortalisation.
The embalmed body ceases to grow old. The supple-skinned subject in Anna Weyant’s Two Eileens (2022) appears waxy and ageless, with an almost medieval sheen to her skin. As the monk of Montaudon (1193–1210) once mused: “I saw people complain to God about women who make their flesh shine.”
Artist Dig-a-Hole creates a realm populated by eternal, round and shimmering figures. Waxy tears spill from a face that belongs to neither woman, nor moon, but some strange thing that exists between the two. Like the embalmed figures, the subjects seem to exist in a liminal space between life and death.
Pat McGrath’s viral Maison Margiela makeup also bears a polished porcelain doll semblance. The models donned glass skin with dramatic John Galliano gowns; reminiscent of Brassaï’s 1920 portraits. Illusory and ghoul-like, their shimmering faces reflect the overhead lights. Tali Lennox’s painted figures are equally waxen; entrails spill out of a glossed belly as melted tears cry from oiled shadow-lit faces.
The gleaming bodies hold something transcendental and incorporeal; namely, the liminality of preserved flesh. Even dead, there is something hauntingly alive and seductive in the glass-like bodies.
As we see with the preserved saint’s bodies, the discursive power of the corpse cannot be separated from its artificially waxen materiality, and Lennox’s disassembled bodies do just this; preserved, half dead and half alive, they haunt from the liminal space their bodies lie in.
Lola Gil’s subjects are protected by their embalmment, encased inside glass. The waxy tear is a recurrent motif within the world of these shiny subjects, as though being entombed in their reflective shell-like bodies causes a lonely kind of sadness; just as it might with our own glass-like entombings, whether through social media or our obsession with preserving skin, that we find ourselves trapped in.
Christina Bothwell’s subjects transcend their stone bodies to become levitating translucent girls. Perhaps it is safer to be a woman of wax, or glass, to escape from a body that is otherwise entangled with its referential relationship to absence. Or in other words, perhaps, it is safer to flee from a flesh, or lived experience as a body, that at times feels more vacuous then where we might fantasise about escaping too.
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All these luminous and embalmed women remain young forever in their glossy encasements — though the waxen body that melts, rather than preserves, offers a different view on death. A.F. Vandevorst’s wax sculpture of a sleeping girl, presents a body in the process of decomposing. The sculpture was melted over a month during the Arnhem Mode Biennale (2011), leaving nothing but limp wicks in its wake.
Similarly, Urs Fischer’s wax sculptures of a life-size replica of Giambologna’s Abduction of a Sabine Woman (1579-1582), and a wax replica of a gallery spectator in a suit (2011), also liquify the illusion of a fixed, body, presenting the flesh in constant flux and gradual disintegration.
Fischer and Vandervost’s ephemeral wax subjects present a more threatening problem; namely the notion of change, decomposition and death – themes which are branded taboo for fear that they might render meaningless the routines which structure our daily lives. To live like the embalmed, waxy and eternal is more alluring — though ultimately, despite our acts to preserve the dying and escape the truth of our own unremitting decay, the body cannot be separate from its own enfleshment. Hope is when we can leave the traps of inertia, returning to the reality of living, breathing flesh.
