Every Ocean Hughes: List Projects 33

“If it is ever possible to diminish fear, it is beautiful to witness.”

So says the death doula in Every Ocean Hughes’s One Big Bag (2021). The video—alongside the performances Help the Dead (2019) and River (2023)—is part of a trilogy that considers the intimate processes of dying and grieving.

In One Big Bag, Hughes stages a monologue by a millennial death doula (performed by Lindsay Rico, with choreography by Miguel Gutierrez). Surrounded by the objects of her mobile “corpse kit,” the doula assuredly explains her tools: tampons for absorbing fluid, scissors for cutting cloth, bowls for washing, ceremonial bells. In her address, the practical matters of dealing with a corpse are balanced with an unencumbered spirit of care for the dead and those around them.

The same objects in One Big Bag are similarly hung in the gallery—the height of each indexing the height at which they are used. Encountered in this way, the objects register as active instruments of tending, inviting an embodied awareness of the gestures of care they enable. A new photograph assembles these objects in a still life, echoing the memento mori tradition within still life painting, in which ordinary objects double as meditations on mortality.

Refusing the fictions of euphemism or automatic recourse to biological family, One Big Bag insists on alternative forms of kinship and communion made in and around death when it is confronted as a brute and beautiful fact. As the performer in the film says, “Death has to be understood with the senses. The mind doesn’t get it.”

List Projects 33: Every Ocean Hughes is organized by Natalie Bell, Chief Curator, and Zach Ngin, Curatorial Assistant.