Nothing matters—unless we make it so: art, mortality, and the creation of meaning

This article treats mortality not as an endpoint but as a force that shapes how we create, relate, and endure. It explores how visual art gives form to absence – rendering loss visible and memory material. Anchored in Dad (2021) – an artwork made with my father’s ashes – this study uses creative autoethnography to examine how personal loss becomes method, not just motif. Through sudden death and slow decline – my father’s passing and my mother’s dementia – the article traces mortality’s dual faces: abrupt and prolonged. Engaging Heidegger, Camus, and de Beauvoir, it argues that confronting death through art does not console – it clarifies. Artists like Quinn, Boltanski, Salcedo, Margolles, and Calle engage the materiality of grief – from blood to bone, mist to loss – transforming the ephemeral into form. Cultural rituals – from Egyptian mummification to Día de los Muertos – echo this impulse, insisting that the dead be made present, not erased. The article argues that art, like ritual, resists forgetting. We do not escape impermanence. But in struggling towards meaning, we shape lives that are no less vivid for being finite.