Second Burial Second Birth

For this painting, I constructed a digital scene in Blender in which the head of my earlier sculpture was placed within its imagined grave. The sculpture itself reinterpreted Tollund Man, an ancient body preserved in peat. re-crafted for our contemporary era of reflection and self-reference. Across its many iterations, the figure has undergone continual transformation: sculpted by hand, digitised through scanning, enlarged and 3D printed, rendered in virtual space, and finally painted.

This chain of processes speaks to the condition of our digital age, where images and objects exist as replicas of replicas, endlessly refracted through layers of mediation. By bringing an ancient human forward into the present through clay, code, print, and paint I sought to give him a metaphorical second life. Yet the painting also stages his return to the ground, a symbolic closure of the cycle. For this reason, the work is titled Second Burial, Second Birth: a meditation on how identity, memory, and form are perpetually remade across time and technology.