Let me warn you now, this is very, very clever but also very, very creepy.
All Images/www.nadinejarvis.com
Nadine Jarvis is a British product designer who has a great interest in Post Mortem. She’s particularly interested “in the death and decomposition of materials and how the degradation of materials could be used to aid the grieving process.”
As part of her ongoing research to “challenge our archaic post mortem traditions and to offer proposals for alternate treatment for our deceased”, Nadine has created this:
So it just looks like a nice wooden box with pencils to you and me, no? Well, as well as being a lovely looking wooden box, it also serves as an urn.
The pencils are made from the carbon of human cremains.
If you can get your head around that and not be too creeped out, good, because her idea is actually super clever:
“Each pencil is foil stamped with the name of the person. Only one pencil can be removed at a time, it is then sharpened back into the box causing the sharpenings to occupy the space of the used pencils. Over time the pencil box fills with sharpenings – a new ash, transforming it into an urn. The window acts as a timeline, showing you the amount of pencils left as time goes by.”
I know I’ve said the word ‘clever’ like a million times, but isn’t it SO CLEVER?! Once you get past the fact that it’s a ‘dead-body-pencil’ and you really think about it, it’s amazing. And kind of special.
I don’t understand why people get so creeped out by that kind of stuff. I’d totally get made into pencils – I’d me more creeped out getting buried.
My dad’s ashes are still sitting at home somewhere, I’d love to scatter them or do something with them, but the rest of my family would rather keep them. I do sometimes hide him for people to find in weird places, to get a bit of a reaction.
Probably get a better reaction after someone has written with a pencil made from him though. That would be awesome…
“so, why is your dad’s name on this pencil?”
“oh, It’s made from him”….