Sorry I've been so quiet recently. I had a long rest after Dying for Life, then a push to write up the final bits for my photography degree and Arts Council grant. And now I'm converting some of my dissertation (and yes, that's a link to my actual dissertation - if you fancy a read) into a 20 minute whirlwind tour of death in visual art in the past 1000 years for the Death and the Maiden conference. I am currently wrangling with quite how much I should venture my personal the

18,050* people were at the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies last month. *This figure is an estimate. But I guess that 50 alive people came to visit some of the 18,000 human remains of the Duckworth Collection, kept at the LCHES. Of course, because of the peculiar sensitivities of the British, most of the human remains weren’t (and aren’t ever) on display. But there were an impressive mass of human and hominid skull casts in the main reception room; the best I

I have a medical skeleton. I have an additional medical skeleton. I have been studying bones and human anatomy, and whilst quite ill haven't been able to go and visit museums to augment this as often as I would like. And since spending time restringing the hand and foot of a medical half skeleton using a friend's plastic skeleton as a guide, I realised quite how different different skeletons are, and how one mass produced medical skeleton isn't very broad in showing the marve

... to the Wellcome Collection. A wonderful way to spend an afternoon. And actually my favourite part were the audio extracts, one of which was on the headphones behind this... skeleton? It is a description by Albert Howard Carter III (in First Cut: A season in the human anatomy lab) of medical students cutting hearts out of cadavers: "A quick worker, he is the first to have a heart entirely removed from the body. I watch him cut the last blood vessel and pull the heart up an