Reference and Reverence is a two-year long photographic project on the emerging trend of ecological burial in the United States. The body of work is a photo-based documentary that considers natural burial as an alternative to standard funeral practices. My thesis project is in book form as well as an exhibition installation. The work addresses green burial’s newfound resurgence. In an era of environmental concern, the importance of planet stewardship and modern industrial burial practices are questioned. The reflection is one of re-visiting death as tradition, as well as one of contemplating our co-existence with the world.

My interest in natural burial stems from the curiosities of death rituals as well as North American cultural attitudes about death. For many of us, our first accounts of death are often works of imagination or counterfeits produced by visual media culture, hiding the reality of death behind layers of archetypes or symbols. We are out of touch with death and out of sync with our environment.

I am convinced that every image of the dead is a document. Death has been kept out of our lives; it only presents itself as a symbol or trope in visual culture. To this day there are no operating ecological preserves in Canada. I have felt a pressing need to produce this work, to demand a renewed discourse of the dead and its place in our limited landscape.