List Projects 33: Every Ocean Hughes

“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. 

Every Ocean Hughes (b. 1977, lives and works in Stockholm and New York) is a transdisciplinary artist and writer. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2023); Studio Voltaire, London (2022); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2022); Secession, Vienna (2015); and PARTICIPANT INC., New York (2015). Collaboration has been a central part of her practice: She was editor and cofounder of the queer feminist journal and artist collective LTTR, has written lyrics for several bands (The Knife, Colin Self, JD Samson & MEN), and has done costume design. Hughes’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Kadist, Paris/San Francisco, among others. For over ten years, Hughes has taught art in Europe and the US and works as a coach for artists and creative producers as West Street Coaching.