My name is Quinn Jacobson. As an artist, I've always been drawn to the space where creativity and mortality converge. My current project explores how we use art to confront—or perhaps deny—our inevitable end. Drawing deeply from Ernest Becker's groundbreaking work on death anxiety and terror management theory, I'm creating both visual pieces and written reflections that examine how the creative process serves as my personal immortality project. Through my own artistic journey, I question whether…
In the first 38 pages of Glass Bones , I laid out the central problem: human beings are animals who became conscious enough to understand that we will die. I examined how the awareness of death organizes much of human thought, behavior, culture, and creativity, rather than being a mere occasional fear. Chapter 3 follows that question backward. If death awareness creates the problem, when did the…
Chapter 2 explores the uniquely human burden of knowing that we will die. While every living creature faces death, only human beings possess the capacity to anticipate it, creating a profound psychological dilemma. Drawing on Ernest Becker, Terror Management Theory, and evolutionary perspectives (Varkiu & Brower), the chapter argues that culture, identity, and meaning function as protective…
The chapter is titled "The Problem We Don't Admit." It asks a simple but unsettling question: What happened when human beings first realized they were going to die? The chapter explores mortality awareness as the defining rupture in human consciousness and introduces the central ideas that the rest of the book builds upon. It draws from the work of Ernest Becker, Ajit Varki, and Danny Brower and…
I’m an artist, writer, and educator exploring the intersection of creativity, mortality, and what it means to be human. My work draws heavily from the ideas of Ernest Becker, particularly around death anxiety, the denial of death, Terror Management Theory, and creativity. The book: Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind
Jimmy, 2003—Salt Lake City, Utah, 10 x 8 in. positive print from a wet collodion negative. copyright Quinn B. Jacobson This was a wonderful and productive conversation. A big thanks to Michael and Lynn for this—I hope you enjoy it. THE END OF THE ROAD
Greetings, I hope this finds you well. Thank you for the tremendous response to Glass Bones . I truly appreciate it. I’ve been deeply immersed in my new project, Rupture: The Creative Response to Death Anxiety . I also posted the first part of a reading from Glass Bones . I plan to continue the series over the coming weeks, reading sections from the book and talking a little about the ideas behind…
Greetings, I have been having a wonderful summer. I hope yours is going well too, or winter, if you're in that part of the world. In Las Cruces, summer starts in April, so it's been warm here for quite a while. We've been in the 100s °F (38+ °C) for most of June. I think we hit 105 °F (40°C) the other day. Whatever I might say about the heat, I can honestly say it isn't snow. It's been wonderful…
50 copies of Glass Bones. Each numbered, stamped, and signed. I’m very happy to say that the first orders of Glass Bones shipped today. I have 50 copies of hardbacks, and the rest will be through Amazon (paperback; they are not signed or stamped). If you want to get a copy, click here . After these are gone, the paperback version will be available after June 19, 2026. Each book has a note from me…
I'm pleased to announce that I'll be giving a free online talk for Morbid Anatomy on September 28, 2026, at 5:00 PM MST. The presentation is based on my new book, Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind , a project that grew out of more than three decades of artistic practice and years of research into mortality, creativity, psychology, and meaning-making. At the center of the talk are two…
As I wait for the printer to ship a load of Glass Bones in June, I want to share what's next. I've started a new body of work for a new book. The title is RUPTURE. The subtitle: The Creative Response to Death Anxiety. I'm approaching this differently than Glass Bones. Creative work in the foreground. Theory in the background. The theory still matters, because I plan to do more than explain Rupture…
Front cover, spine, and back cover of Glass Bones. 2026 “ The photograph preserves presence by recording its disappearance .” — Quinn Jacobson, Glass Bones (influenced by John Berger and Roland Barthes) I’ll be doing the final edits on the manuscript this week. I’ve now gone through the book several times, including all 26 chapters, the introductions, conclusions, notes, and preface. Honestly,…
Untitled (Spiked Hair Portrait) , 2004. 4 × 5 inch black glass ambrotype. Quinn Jacobson Note. The sitter’s profile is rendered with stark clarity against a neutral ground, while the radiating, sculptural hair disrupts the frame, producing a tension between stillness and kinetic form. The wet collodion process amplifies surface detail and tonal depth, allowing the image to oscillate between…
The Collapse of Meaning and the Work of Repair There are moments when the structures that once held your life together begin to loosen. Not dramatically, at least not at first. It’s subtler than that. A thinning. A slight misalignment between the story you’ve been living inside and the experience of actually living it. Things still function, externally. But internally, something has shifted. The…
I was surprised to find two prints of mine in this show in Istanbul, Turkey. I know Kerim, the owner of the gallery, he owns both of the prints, but he never informed me about the exhibition.
“Residue, Red Yucca” - experimental cyanotype from a whole plate wet collodion negative. There’s a moment in the darkroom when an image stops behaving like a document and starts behaving like a memory. Not a record of something that happened, but something closer to the feeling of having been there without being able to say exactly when or how or even if it was real. That’s where this print seems…
Rupture Field Theory: Before I Had the Language - Introducing Episode 11 There are moments in life that don’t make sense when they happen. They don’t arrive as ideas. They don’t announce themselves as important. They pass quietly, almost unnoticed, but something in them stays. Not exactly as memory, but as pressure. An imprint that doesn’t resolve. Episode 11 of The Creative Mind & Mortality…
There’s a moment, usually quiet, sometimes abrupt, when the systems we rely on to make sense of our lives begin to show strain. Not collapse exactly. Instead, it manifests as a subtle instability. A recognition that what once felt solid might be more provisional than we assumed. This episode opens with Work Song by Hozier, a track that, on first listen, reads as devotion. But listen more closely,…
Front and back cover. I wanted to share a few pages from Glass Bones —a glimpse into how the book is beginning to take shape as a physical object. I’m still working. Still in the darkroom, still at the canvas, still refining the manuscript. Every day. But it’s close now. Close enough that I can begin to think less about what it is becoming and more about where it might live once it leaves my…
Episode 9 — The Creative Mind & Mortality Series There’s a moment in God Shuffled His Feet by Crash Test Dummies that lingers longer than it should. It’s not dramatic. Nothing collapses. No revelation arrives. People sit in the shade with God, drinking wine, asking questions about death. What happens to the body? What carries forward? What remains? The questions are direct, almost childlike in…
Why Not Just Buffer? Buffering is the psychological and cultural process that regulates our awareness of death, embedding it within beliefs, identities, and meanings that make it tolerable enough to live and function. Most of us do this constantly, automatically, and without knowing it. The question worth sitting with is not whether buffering happens, but what it costs, and whether there is…