Death as I am Alive started out as a project during my first year at GSA that I had absolutely no feelings towards. I was completely stuck and had more or less no ideas. We were asked to bring a few objects from home and eventually have the final piece revolve around ´one of these. One of the objects I brought in was a piece of wood from a tree that had fallen in a park close to my childhood home. During the discussions leading up the wooden bit had always been a symbol of life. However, this took a sharp turn a Sunday midways through. I was on my way to the park Kelvingrove in Glasgow when I crossed a bridge over a motorway. On this bridge was a man looking over the massive road beneath. The only problem in this story was that I soon noticed that he was on the wrong side of the fence. My instincts kicked in and I confronted the man, and ended up having arguably one of the most overwhelming and extreme conversations of my life. The situation ended fairly well when others came to help, got him away from the bridge and started a long conversation with him. Still, this whole experience shook me heavily and kept me out of focus the following days.

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The desperation in the man's eyes when I told him "don't jump", and the way he answered "no?" thought me how fragile life is and how connected life is to death. How intertwined it is and how shortly the only point of life can be death.

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It might seem like a cynical way to view it, but the experience gave me something to work with. The following week I wrote poem after poem and long streams of consciousness. Eventually this became the solution to my creative block; I decided to use the wooden bit as a symbol in a film adapting one of the texts written after the incident. 

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Film is presented on request.

September, 2018