TO DIE UPON A KISS – PART ONE

By Fred Wilson, artist

This text was originally published in NGV Triennial 2020, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2020.

The title of this work comes from a line in Shakespeare’s Othello (1604), during a horrific and mournful moment in the play. Shakespeare’s plays consistently get to the heart of the human condition in a thoroughly resonant, compelling and beautiful manner. I attempt to do the same, in my own way. In Othello, the death of Desdemona, and the death of Othello himself, caused me to ruminate on that moment of leaving the known for the unknown. I ‘felt’ this work. In life, death is never irrelevant. Rather than representing death specifically, the chandelier in To die upon a kiss, 2011, though historic in its design (like the play), allows me to look at the timeless act (the last act). It allows me to transcend fear – to try to see it as a part of the nature of all things.

When looking at To die upon a kiss as a completed work, I see my father’s life force in the blackness of the chandelier, draining down from the body as his spirit rose out. My father’s peaceful death occurred around the time of the work’s creation. Equally about Othello and my father, it is also about beauty and its uplifting, rejuvenating ability in times of sadness and remembrance.

As a makeshift morgue sits outside the hospital near my home, the COVID-19 pandemic is leaving a long solemn shadow. I believe intelligent thought, words and images (and light!) matter in helping us make it through the gloom.