Death is inevitable and we’re all circling the drain of oblivion. But why scatter your ashes to the wind, when they could be used to penetrate your loved ones’ orifices? That’s what designer Mark Sturkenboom believes, anyway. Hence why he’s created 21 Grams, a disturbing sort of urn/dildo combo.
Images VIA
Sturkenboom explains:
After a passing, the missing of intimacy with that person is only one aspect of the pain and grief. I sometimes help an elderly lady with her groceries and she has an urn standing near the window with the remains of her husband. She always speaks with so much love about him but the jar he was in didn’t reflect that at all.
In that same period, I read an article about widows, taboos and sex and intimacy and then I thought to myself “can I combine these themes and make an object that is about love and missing and intimacy?”
As fucked up as it sounds, I’m starting to come around to the idea. It makes life-after-death a lot like life-before-birth: either way, you’re waiting to be pulled out of a vagina. Besides, sexual imagery and mortality have always been culturally intertwined, particularly in youthful interpretations of the human condition (sex and death are often considered to be joint obsessions of adolescence). Just take the example of ‘la petite mort’ — translated as ‘the little death’ – a French euphemism for orgasm, or more specifically that post-jizz feeling you get where you sort of transcend your ego a bit. Anyway, if it really is in the midst of death that we are in life, if we must accept our own mortality in order to live authentically, then maybe sometimes you just have to do weird shit like cremate people and put them in buttplugs.
