Death Work as Art: Reclaiming Our Collective Creativity
When I say “death work as art,” I’m not speaking in metaphor. I mean it literally: death work holds unlimited creative potential to transform our cultures. Art has always been the field where imagination expands, where status quos are challenged, and where new possibilities for living, and dying, emerge.
A gallery installation can just as easily become a form of death education. A ritual can carry the weight of performance art, disrupting the silence around grief and mortality. When we frame death work not only as service or care but as cultural artistry, we widen the field. Suddenly, we unlock doors for people who would never be drawn to the word doula.
Without engaging our inner-artist, death work risks becoming formulaic. We repeat someone else’s patterns instead of shaping our own. We begin to doubt our voice, falling into the imposter phenomenon. I’ve seen this happen so many times. It’s saddening. A death worker steps into a training program then leaves never picking up their death work because they weren’t taught how to manifest their own way with this work. We pipeline creative flow instead of letting it rush forward like the wild spring it is.
But when we approach death through art, everything changes. Art breaks open possibility. Art lets us reimagine what ritual looks like, how grief literacy is shared, and what communal care can be. It makes space for death work that is alive, responsive, and culture-shifting.
Every single one of us was born with a well of creativity. I was a nanny and pre-school teacher for 19 years. I promise, every child is creative. They prove this daily with their wildly inventive capacities. It is a colonized society that cages creativity, reducing art to a product and declaring only some people “artists.” But, where did that creative flow go?
The same colonized logic has touched death work too: commodifying care, packaging training, and treating death literacy as something that can be bought and sold. Both art and death are too essential for that. They are birthrights, belonging to everyone.
So when I say “artists,” I mean all of us. Each of us is capable of bringing imagination to death work and grief education. Each of us can reclaim grief from silence, challenge sterilized death care, bend culture toward aliveness, with our own well of creativity.
This is the heart of my work at the Nine Keys School of Death Arts, a place where death workers, artists, and seekers of all kinds gather to explore the edges of imagination, culture, and mortality.
If you’ve ever felt the call to weave death work with creativity, or to discover what your own inner-artist has to say about dying, grief, and cultural change, I invite you to explore with us.
🗝️ Learn more here: Nine Keys School of Death Arts
Because when death work becomes art, culture remembers itself. And when artists, meaning all of us, take up death work, we begin to imagine worlds worth living and dying for.
