There is a particular kind of object that stops people in their tracks. Not because it is loud or obvious, but because it is precise — because every detail has been considered, and the whole is somehow more than the sum of its parts. A coffin shadowbox is that kind of object. The shape alone carries centuries of meaning. What goes inside it, and how it is built, determines whether it becomes something extraordinary.
I build coffin shadowboxes entirely by hand, from scratch. The frames are not bought and filled — they are made. Shaped, finished, lined, ornamented, and then composed around whatever lives at the centre. It is slow work. It is the kind of work I love most.
The Coffin as a Form
The coffin shape has been with us for a very long time. It is one of the most immediately legible forms in human visual culture — everyone knows what it means, and everyone responds to it. In gothic art and dark aesthetics, the coffin is not a symbol of death so much as a symbol of the threshold: the moment between one state and another, the container that holds what is most precious and most fragile.
I am drawn to the coffin shape for exactly this reason. It is not decorative in the conventional sense. It is charged. When I build a coffin frame and line it with velvet and lace, when I place a specimen or a collection of objects inside it and close the glass front, I am making something that carries that charge deliberately. These are reliquaries in the oldest sense of the word: containers built to honour what they hold.
Coffin Shadowboxes with Specimens
The wooden coffin frames I build for bats and moths are larger, more architectural. The frame itself is the first statement — handbuilt, shaped by hand, finished with velvet and ornamental detail before the specimen is placed inside. The coffin shape echoes the creature: a bat in a coffin frame is not ironic. It is inevitable. It is exactly where it belongs.
A death’s-head moth in a handbuilt coffin frame is something I find endlessly compelling. The moth already carries so much — the skull marking on its thorax, the mythology of the omen, the extraordinary delicacy of its wings. The coffin frame does not add meaning so much as concentrate it. Everything unnecessary falls away. What remains is the creature, the velvet, the glass, and the silence.
On Making by Hand
Everything I make is built alone, by hand, one piece at a time. The coffin work is the most labour-intensive of all of it — the frames themselves take time before a single element of the composition is placed inside. But it is also the work that feels most complete to me. There is something about the coffin shape that demands total commitment. You cannot make a coffin shadowbox halfway. Either it is right, or it is not.
If you are drawn to objects that carry genuine weight — that feel like they were made for a reason, and will last — you are in the right place.
