Rosie Leventon
Rosie Leventon's sculpture Burial Ship explores death as a transition – inspired by archaic mythological ideas of a journey into a new state. The burial boat is a universal and symbolic representation in many cultures – from the ancient Greeks to the Vikings – of the fateful journey into the afterlife. Inspired by the famous 7th-century Sutton Hoo ship burial, in which an Anglo-Saxon king is believed to have been laid to rest, Leventon uses X-ray images as material for her ship. The outer shell, made of interior views of human bodies, formerly made of animal skin, bark or canvas, surrounds an equally fragile inner skeleton.