She didn’t want to tell me where she gets her bones. “That’s all anyone asks,” she said. “I want to joke and say I found them in a bag in the park.” She’s not being secretive, but she doesn’t want to break the spell. The human remains she uses in her art are heavy with mystery, and they inspire questions about the living bodies they once supported. Whose flesh hung on these bones? Did they belong to a man or woman? How did these people die? She writes fantastic biographies for the bones in her Human Series. “At the age of 17, Seraphine was struck by lightning while gathering plums in her father’s orchard,” begins one story. Another starts with “Xenocrates was born in Delphi during the exact moment of a solar eclipse.” Winn works the bones into triptychs painted with scenes of these imagined lives. “There is a magic I am trying to create,” she said.
In banal reality, human bones are surprisingly easy to obtain. Winn sources most of her acquisitions from Berkeley, California, where dealers sell off pieces from broken anatomical models. The Bone Room, one Berkeley retailer, takes online orders and ships internationally. Its adult skulls start at around $700. A full rack of human ribs costs $260; kneecaps will set you back $75 a pair. According to Canada’s Criminal Code, it is legal to possess, buy, and sell human bones, as long as they have not been “improperly or indecently” interfered with. Still, boxes of human remains tend to arouse the suspicions of customs officials, and Winn’s shipments take a long time crossing the border.
She seeks out “third-class bones,” specimens that are old, stained, and unloved. “Somebody died, and these are their remains,” she said, “and they’re in a drawer collecting dust. I take them, and I create something new and give that person a new life.” The bones originally came from India or China, but that is all she knows about them. She rarely learns the gender of the owners. The small bones — vertebrae, sacra, and sternums — she uses most often in her work are nearly impossible to sex, although she sees some bones as feminine. The collarbone and the scapula are female, she said, though she is not sure why — something about the smoothness of their surfaces, or their gentle curves. Perhaps these bones suggest femininity because the collarbone and the scapula are considered beautiful parts of a woman’s body.
The artistic display of human remains is an ancient tradition, and was especially prominent in early Christianity. Churches scrambled to obtain sacred relics as a means of attracting congregations to their pews. Body parts of saints and martyrs were especially prized, even if their authenticity seemed dubious. At one point during Christianity’s confused adolescence, at least three churches claimed to possess the preserved head of John the Baptist. Jesus’s and the Virgin Mary’s ascensions into heaven were rather inconvenient for relic dealers as there were no holy corpses to display. Instead, vials containing Christ’s blood and Mary’s breast milk appeared, as did Jesus’s foreskin and baby teeth. The veracity of these remnants was unimportant, as long as devotees believed in them, and believed in their stories; the miraculous lives of Christian saints and holy men from other faiths imparted spiritual powers to their remains.
But Winn’s anonymous bones come with no such narratives, so she creates fictions for those whose true biographies remain unwritten. A discarded clavicle inspired the story of Odette, the Patron Saint of the Damned. A humerus gave rise to the tale of Lalazar, a priest’s apprentice who saw demons lead plague victims from their deathbeds. A scapula told the tragedy of Horishi Kiku, a tattooist whose designs magically came to life. Haunted by her powers, Kiku committed suicide by tattooing a poisonous snake onto her own chest. Winn hopes her triptychs create a “second coming” for her nameless, storyless dead. When they are mounted, she feels an energy emanating from the bones that does not exist beforehand. She is not a terribly spiritual person, but she can sense the life in them.
She composes these biographies and assembles the shrines with great care and respect. She hopes the bones’ unknown “donors” would approve of their reincarnations. This is why she did not, at first, tell me about Bijou the Bear Handler and her sister, Piranha-Hanna. For these pieces, Winn cut a set of little shark teeth and inserted them into the empty tooth sockets of two human jawbones. According to her story, the mandibles belonged to twin sisters born with jagged teeth who ended up as sideshow performers: Bijou in Russia, Piranha-Hanna in America. “I feel a little bit guilty,” Winn said, because these two pieces break her rule about being respectful to the bones’ owners. “They may not like these teeth. I mean, would you?”
Shark-toothed twins notwithstanding, the aim of Winn’s Human Series is to restore the collective space between the living and the dead. Through most of the past two millennia, Western cultures had an intimate relationship with their dead. Cemeteries moved from outside the city walls and into the churchyards, and the spiritual commingling between the living and the departed formed a single community. Modern secularism severed this closeness, and death became something to fear, to avoid, and to hide away. Winn’s work seeks to change this. Having the dead not just among the living, but hung in the living room, forces us to re-examine our relationship with death and become comfortable in its presence. “Death is part of life,” Winn told me. “It can be sad — I’ve had people I love die — but sometimes it is the perfect ending.”
I gave the skull back to her when I stood to leave her home. I’d been holding it for two hours, and had passed its physical and symbolic weight from hand to hand. Its smell still clung to my fingertips and lingered in the back of my throat. I pointed out that the aroma reminded me of sour milk.
“Interesting,” she said. “I’m going to have to go and sniff my bone cupboard.”
