Resting Places

Amelia Seabury, Jane

Acrylic paint on canvas, 2018

The saturated hues and playful brushstrokes of this piece create an overall sense of nostalgic joy, a feeling that comes to me whenever I visit the place this painting was set: a family cabin in the mountains. For as long I can remember, I have roamed the fields and forests in the surrounding area, walking alongside grazing cows. As I encountered these creatures, I would name them, recognizing them as a fellow being inhabiting the land. The cow in the composition, Jane, gazes back at the viewer as if quietly stating her own agency as an individual. However, there is a note of bitter irony which I often chose to forget, because each year, the herd would be slaughtered for their meat and ultimately the lives of these cows were cut short for human consumption. The next year, though, new cows would graze, and the cycle would begin again. -Amelia Seabury

Amelia Seabury, Final Resting Place

Acrylic paint on canvas, 2022

While digging for inspiration for a piece to pair with Jane, I stumbled across a memory of finding a cow skeleton on the fenceline of the property. I was amazed by the enormity of the creature’s bones, and was especially drawn to the sculptural beauty of the skull which lay in three pieces. We brought the skull fragments back to the house and assembled them on a ledge protruding from the cabin. In the most literal sense, the skull depicts the natural decay of life to death, but to end the conversation there feels incomplete. By placing the skull at the cabin entrance, does it honor the lives of the cows that have died for our consumption? On the contrary, perhaps this cow, who had escaped slaughter but not the harsh winter, would have preferred to stay in the dirt, returning to the earth from which it came. -Amelia Seabury