The Evanescence Project
The Evanescence Project is a photographic meditation on impermanence, drawing on the visual language of traditional still life and the symbolic weight of memento mori. Composed entirely of composted organic materials sourced from my own bin, these images exist in tension between beauty and decay, presence and disappearance.
Rooted in the lineage of vanitas painting, the work reimagines the still life not as a celebration of abundance, but as a quiet acknowledgment of transience. Fruits collapse, petals darken, and vegetal forms soften into dissolution, each composition bearing witness to the quiet undoing of matter. These are not staged tableaux in the classical sense, but emergent arrangements shaped by weather, chemistry and time.
The compost bin becomes both studio and collaborator, a site of natural transformation where formal disorder gives rise to unexpected harmonies. I am drawn to these moments of material transition, when vitality gives way to collapse, when something formerly discarded reveals an unanticipated beauty. In photographing these forms, I seek to view decay as a generative force.
The Evanescence Project is a study in the aesthetics of entropy, a contemplation of mortality through the lens of the everyday. It asks us to consider the elegance of decomposition, and the haunting, fragile splendor of what does not last.. - Steven J. Duede