“Yea, those are human brains.”
I’m looking into a wooden display cabinet with Stephanie Stewart Bailey.
“It's kind of like a yellowy color they're in right now because they're still leaching liquid and blood and just different pigments and that's just a natural process,” she says.
We’re in the SOMA district of San Francisco and Stewart Bailey is showing me around her tiny, bedroom-sized museum. You could walk down the quiet alley it’s on and easily miss it.
“I curate The Body Appropriate. It's my own private studio gallery all based on anatomy and death culture and dying as well.”
Stewart Bailey works at the science museum the Exploratorium. But she started this space in July of 2014 as a way to fully explore her morbid fascination. Before it was a museum, it was her private artists studio -- she lives in a warehouse space behind the museum.
“Death is kind of having a moment right now. People are actually talking about it. The DIY artist generation is starving for a way to connect to death,” shy says.
Death Culture
There is a tiny alternative death community that is trying to fold death into our lives. In Mill Valley, Fernwood cemetery is one of the nation’s first cemeteries to provide green burials; they bury the dead without embalming chemicals, without polished headstones, and with biodegradable caskets. This past October San Francisco hosted it’s first Death Salon which featured conversations about alternative ideas around mortality and mourning.
But it is not just local. In Seattle, Katrina Spade is working on The Urban Death Project which would compost dead bodies and turn them into a small park in the middle of a city. Mortician Caitlin Doughty is trying to open up Undertaking LA where she would work with the bereaved to help them prepare the bodies of the dead themselves for a wake in their own home. Stewart Bailey says that with modern funerals we’ve become too distant from death.
“It's not scary to take care of a dead person. It's actually beautiful and moving.”
She leads me over to what looks like a vintage wooden tea cart. It’s actually a 19th century portable embalming table. On top is a bag that has something similar to finely crushed up sea shells. She picks it up. There are jars with brains in the cupboard - so this could be anything.
It’s ashes from a cremation.
“That was my dog - that I grew up with. Her name was ruffles. I loved her dearly and now I get to share her for educational purposes. People are freaked out to touch the body and that's kind of the whole point of The Body Appropriate: to create this kind of atmosphere or comfort to handle things that we're usually afraid of but maybe we don't actually have to be afraid of.”
I’m anxious. It feels inappropriate for me to touch her dog’s ashes.
But she tell me she is “taking the taboo away” and giving me permission.
She pours the remains into my hands. I spend a moment with Ruffles, then I put her back. There is a bit of residue left on my hands.
“You should lick it and then she'll forever be ingested in your body. People eat them all the time they put them in food,” she says.
Besides... eating... there are many alternative ways to memorialize your loved ones. Tattoo artists can blend ashes into tattoo ink. A UK company will press them into vinyl records and put songs or the voice of the deceased on the LP. In Alabama, My Holy Smoke will put ashes into ammunition.
Rendering
Stewart Bailey walks me over to a piece of installation art.
“Over here is ‘From The Fat Off Of Our Bones’ -- it's by Jame Cooby and Katrina Chamberlain,” she says.
The piece is a video of a sheep being slaughtered and soap being boiled from its fat. Next to the video screen is a gigantic bar of soap that you are supposed to use wash your feet.
It’s now a major part of Stewart Bailey’s museum, but when she first saw the piece, her immediate response was that of disgust. “I actually refused to have my feet washed,” she says.
It may have grossed her out at first, but she couldn’t get it out of her head. She says she became fixated on her own repulsion.
“I think what's changed in me is I got obsessed with learning about internal anatomy,” she says.
She started doing public dissections of animals and loved watching people react.
“So you get this like mixture of screams and squeals and ‘Oh my god that's amazing!’ and ‘Oh what's that smell!’ But they don't walk away. And so it's this really beautiful transition to witness other people go through of this learning process and getting over their fears.”
And she didn’t stop there. She became an Eye Technician - someone who surgically removes the corneas from the deceased.
“It would actually go to transplant on to someone who was going blind from corneal blindness.”
She might get a call at 3 a.m. “and then I would be in scrubs,” she says. “It would be about an hour to sterilize the face and then surgically cut into the eye and remove the cornea. And some of the first recoveries, I would just sit with them and hold their hand for a moment before I started.”
It’s a kind of intimacy that you could never have with a live body. Emotionally, it was really hard. But it was important to her.
“I kind of got addicted to my own fears,” Stewart Bailey says. “I'm a very socially anxious and shy person and so, as soon as I started handling human dead bodies myself for the cornea transplants, there was something that just sort of clicked inside of me where like -- there's no time. Death could come at any moment, there's no time to be shy anymore.”
A Real Death
After walking by a terrarium filled with flesh eating beetles we go into the tiny closet that serves as the library. At the museum’s grand opening back in the summer of 2014 people were invited to read the books here, or explore the exhibits, and there were lectures and films screenings. But there was one exhibitor who couldn’t make it.
Ron Cauble owned a store in Berkeley called The Bone Room -- it could basically be the museum gift shop for The Body Appropriate.
“It was really tragic. That the very week that the body appropriate opened I got an email from his wife saying 'Stephanie - Ron passed away.’”
At the opening of this museum of death, real death made an appearance.
“Everything just became very real at the point.” she says. “So for the event we talked about him for a little bit. But I think that reality check for the audience as well was quite potent.”
It was strangely fitting, but so tragic. Also, Cauble was an organ donor, meaning his body went through Stewart Bailey’s morgue.
“A coworker of operated on his eyes.”
Evan after spending a couple of hours in a museum of death, I still felt anxious talking about a real death.
But Stewart Bailey had made it easier. She says that’s the point: “And maybe this space can give you a vocabulary to talk about some things that you don't usually talk about.”
The goal of the museum, she says, is to make talking about death feel a lot less inappropriate.
