I stumbled upon Mia-Jane Harris’ art while surfing Pinterest. She takes disposed corpses and turns them into beautiful art. To me that’s the ultimate art: turning something naturally associated with quench and turning it into a museum-deserving piece.
As a physician dealing with life and death, I was naturally drawn towards her perspective and thankfully, she accepted being interviewed for Longevity Letter.
Anca: What was your first encounter with art and what made you choose it?
Mia-Jane: The idea of mortality means a lot to me and has always fascinated me due to my death during birth, and my fear of when it will take me next. A lot of things went wrong during my birth and I was born deceased and left with Erbs Palsy (the partial paralysis and stunted growth of my right arm), so I have always had a fascination with the morbid and abnormal. This fear of disappearing through death is what sparked my artwork. I always felt I needed to create and express, and after music failed due to my erbs palsy making instruments too difficult I instead fell into the fine arts. My work is about helping me overcome my fear by accepting death as a thing of beauty and using preservation to show myself that if I can stop decay then I can have some sort of control over death. Being an artist and leaving these drawings, photographs and sculptures behind is my way of living on and never disappearing after I die.
Anca: Where did you perfect your skills of taxidermy, of turning a corpse almost ready to decay into a museum-deserving piece?
Mia-Jane: Taxidermy for me started as just collections. Throughout my life I had always collected things that felt curious, from natural history specimens to morbid antiques. In my late teens taxidermy became one of the main areas of these collections, until one day I thought- why collect when I can create? My taxidermy is self taught through a mixture of internet researches and trial-and-error experiments. What started as an attempt to increase my collections became so much more when I felt how empowering it was to save these creatures from disappearance. As soon as I began it felt like this is what I should have been doing for all the years beforehand, so I brought it into my art and this type of preservation and creation is still evolving throughout my work.
Anca: As a physician, I thought about the limits of life and death a lot, especially since I care for people at the end of their lives. I was impressed about the second life you’re giving to newborns that died before accomplishing their full potential. I admit I feel just the same type of compassion when very old people die, because they leave behind so many people and projects it’s heart-breaking. How did you start working on deceased fetuses?
Mia-Jane: I visit medical museums, collections and mortuaries as inspirational fuel for my work. As I walk around these places I appreciate and study the beauty of many of the specimens, but it is the deceased foetal specimens that have always struck me the most. The idea that I could have been, and for a few minutes was, one of those lives that had never started and yet have ended. I hated that they never had their own life cycle, so I put them through a cycle and process as an art-form. I hated that they never had the chance to make an impact on the world, so as an art-form I let them do this. And I hated that they had never left that hospital, that their eyes have never seen the world outside of that building; so I draw them, print them, paint them, capture their essence and I let them escape. I take their eyes to see the world outside of the hospital walls.
Anca: Do you view death differently after years of turning corpses into art?
Mia-Jane: I have adapted many of my fears to fascinations. I still tremble at the idea of my demise, but I have learnt that it is not death itself that I dread but the disappearance that follows. So if I can leave behind enough memories passed on through people to come, enough trinkets of expression and allurement, and enough means for inspiration, then maybe I won’t truly perish at all.
Anca: Where can readers enjoy more of your art?
Mia-Jane: I post my most current work on my Facebook page ‘The Art of Mia-Jane Harris’ and I also advertise my next exhibitions both there and on my website www.mia-janeharris.co.uk
