The Horderve

An archaeological scene is staged against a black void: a human skull half-buried in dirt, its jaw missing, its crown carved with Roman numerals marking the present year. A rotting apple rests on top, skewered together with the skull by a sword engraved with the words Memento Mori. The work collapses time—ancient remains, fresh decay, and a contemporary date—into a single impossible artifact.

This composition becomes cognitive dissonance made physical. It presents incompatible truths at once: mortality and denial, urgency and postponement, the knowledge of death and the assumption of tomorrow. The viewer encounters a moment where logic breaks and time folds in on itself, producing unease without explanation. The sword records the warning, the skull bears the date, and the apple continues to rot—suggesting that even when reminded of impermanence, the human response is to proceed as if time were endless.

Engraved with remember you will die on a weapon driven through a skull marked with today’s year, the piece does not comfort. It interrupts. What is uncovered is not only a body, but evidence of how the present chose to live.