Memento Mori translates as “Remember You Must Die”. It is also a description of an object of remembrance. In Medieval and Victorian times, people kept ‘memento mori’ of loved ones, a lock of hair, a memorial spoon, a clay death mask. 

Between 2000 and 2002, Vicki McConville experienced the death of seven family members, including both of her parents. This led her to create a major body of work based on death, dying, memory and memorials. 

Director Federico Fellini once said, “all art is autobiographical, the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography”. 

Memento Mori – art, archives and archetypes was created as part of Vicki McConville’s Masters of Fine Art (MFA) at Monash University, Australia and was accompanied by a 20,000 word thesis including written and visual research. Memento Mori – art, archives and archetypes uses autobiography as inspiration for contemporary new media works and borrows from the wunderkammer tradition of collection and display. Dating back to the 1500’s, and precursor to our modern museum, the wunderkammer celebrated the idea that all the wonders of our world could be contained within a room, within a box. 

Vicki McConville muses that “the computer is our contemporary wunderkammer” and has created a series of mirrored boxed dioramas, reminiscent of what American artist Joseph Cornell described as his “boxes of memory”. These were installed with digital prints, digitised super8 film and soundtracks at SPAN Gallery, Melbourne, Red Gallery, Melbourne, Jan Manton Gallery, Brisbane, Gold Coast Art Award, and later, at Sanskriti Kendra, Delhi, India and at the collateral programme of Art Basel, Basel Switzerland. The exhibitions were met with critical acclaim by visual art critics and audiences alike.