Death as Muse: Joanna Ebenstein on Morbid Anatomy, Memento Mori and the Life-Affirming Dark

There are books that inform you, and there are books that open a door.

For Lotte, Joanna Ebenstein’s The Anatomical Venus was one of those books. It revealed a visual and emotional world in which beauty, the body, mortality, religious imagery, medical history, femininity, devotion, discomfort and wonder could exist together — without reducing death to horror, darkness or spectacle.

Instead, Joanna’s work suggested something more complex: that death can be tender, strange, intelligent, beautiful and deeply human. That looking at mortality can make life feel more precious. That the morbid, approached with care, can become a form of attention.

In this episode of The Transmute Tapes, we speak with Joanna Ebenstein, founder and creative director of Morbid Anatomy — a project dedicated to the strange and fascinating spaces where art, death, medicine, anatomy, mourning, ritual and culture meet.

Joanna is a Brooklyn-based author, photographer, curator and designer. She founded Morbid Anatomy in 2007, first as a blog connected to her photographic work on medical museums. Since then, it has grown into a wide-ranging cultural project: a research library, lecture series, publishing platform, exhibition program, school, community, and, from 2014 to 2016, the beloved Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn.

Her books include Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life, Anatomica, Death: A Graveside Companion, The Anatomical Venus, The Morbid Anatomy Anthology and Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy. She has worked with institutions such as the Mütter Museum, Green-Wood Cemetery, the Wellcome Collection, the Science Museum in London and the Vrolik Museum in Amsterdam.

What makes Joanna’s work so powerful to us is that she does not treat the morbid as something merely dark, decorative or sensational. In her work, death becomes a way of paying attention: to the body, to grief, to memory, to beauty, to forgotten histories, and to the fragile intensity of being alive.

In our conversation, we speak about Morbid Anatomy, memento mori, devotional images, the occult, mourning, fairy tales, curiosity, beauty and death as a creative force.

One of the central threads of the episode is Joanna’s particular curatorial instinct. She does not approach her subjects only through academic categories, but through attraction, resonance and attention. We talk about what she describes as a kind of devotional impulse: the movement toward images, objects, figures and stories that seem to ask for care, contemplation or reverence.

We also speak about her upcoming book The Art of Fairy Tales, and how fairy tales connect to death, transformation, danger, beauty and initiation.

Another important question in the episode is how hidden death has become from many contemporary lives. For earlier generations, death was often far more visibly present in everyday experience. Today, for many of us, it appears more distant, more medicalised, more removed. And yet we still need forms, images, rituals and stories that help us encounter it.

Joanna’s work reminds us that engaging with death is not necessarily morbid in the negative sense. It can be a practice of reverence. A discipline of looking closely. A way of living with more imagination, more gratitude and more attention.

For Marc, one of the most resonant ideas in the conversation is Joanna’s combination of rigor and openness. On one hand, there is research, discipline, history and precision — the serious work of looking closely. On the other, there is intuition, atmosphere, chance, devotion and the willingness to follow something before fully understanding it.

Much meaningful art happens in exactly that space.

Listen to the episode: “Death as Muse: Joanna Ebenstein on Morbid Anatomy, Memento Mori and the Life-Affirming Dark”

Shownotes:

Joanna Ebenstein:
https://www.joannaebenstein.com

Morbid Anatomy:
https://www.morbidanatomy.org