Sam Taylor Wood - 'Still Life' & 'A Little Death'

The artist Sam Taylor Wood made a piece of video art in 2001 called Still Life, which shows a time-lapse of a bowl of fruit decomposing. It looks at the passing of time and what it means to us, as well as showcasing the beauty in something that is decaying and disappearing.

She also made a similar piece later on called A Little Death, which is another time-lapse video but this time of a rabbit decomposing. It explores mortality, and the arguable finality of death. The two videos make an interesting pair as the first one takes a perfect, healthy looking bowl of fruit and seems to take it into a place of degradation and nothingness, while the second piece starts off which an object of death and takes it through a process of coming alive and mobile again through the decomposition process. In A Little Death there is also a piece of fruit in the foreground but it doesn't rot at all, something which Taylor-Wood found disturbing in itself and which could be the result of it being genetically modified.