Update from PhD Land

Clarity on Direction for Doctoral Studies

As I move through this program, I’ll be posting here as part diary/journal and part research/reminders. I’m going to start at the beginning (first things first, in that order).

Despite existing research on death anxiety and Terror Management Theory, there remains a lack of understanding about how artists uniquely engage with mortality through their creative practice. Here lies my sweet spot: artists metabolize absurdity into elegiac beauty, creating work that doesn’t deny death but dwells in its presence.

While previous studies have examined the psychological strategies humans use to manage death anxiety, few have focused on the role of art-making as a direct and conscious confrontation with death (the main driver for me). The literature has largely prioritized quantitative measures of death anxiety and its behavioral outcomes, but less attention has been paid to qualitative, practice-based explorations of how mortality awareness shapes the creative process.

“I use mortality as a creative source, creating art that turns fear into connection and purpose.”

— Quinn Jacobson

I want my work to address this gap by investigating how artists’ engagement with death anxiety can lead to existentially authentic art. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines autoethnography, interviews with artists, and analysis of creative works, this study will explore how artistic practice functions as a site for mortality confrontation and how such engagement reorients artistic purpose and output. It sounds daunting, I know, but it’s really just asking questions about how mortality affects creative people versus those who don’t identify as creative.

The research will contribute to existential psychology, art theory, and creative practice by offering an integrated theoretical and practice-based model for understanding how artists process death anxiety. The findings are expected to inform theories of death anxiety, models of creative practice, and arts-based approaches to existential therapy, ultimately supporting artists, educators, and mental health practitioners in fostering deeper, more meaningful engagement with the realities of death.

“The life-giving question guiding me now is: How might confronting mortality through creativity lead us into deeper, more authentic ways of being human?”

— Quinn Jacobson

Vision Seed (short form)

Helping people directly confront mortality—not as a means to an end, but as a source of ingenuity, fortitude, and a closer bond—is my vision seed. I use historical wounds, grief, and death anxiety in my writing and art to demonstrate how facing our greatest fears can lead to purpose and service. My mission is to advance these discussions so that we can live more compassionately, reciprocally, and with greater presence.

The Explanatory Power of Becker's Ideas and TMT

On the first page of Ernest Becker’s book, The Birth and Death of Meaning (1962), he wrote, “This is an ambitious book. In these times there is hardly any point in writing just for the sake of writing: one has to want to do something really important. What I have tried to do here is to present in a brief, challenging, and readable way the most important things that the various disciplines have discovered about man, about what makes people act the way they do.”

Terror Management Theory (TMT), developed as an extension of Ernest Becker’s work, posits that the uniquely human awareness of mortality gives rise to profound existential anxiety. As Becker argued in The Denial of Death (1973), this awareness creates the potential for paralyzing terror that must be managed if life is to remain bearable. To buffer against this anxiety, individuals construct and maintain cultural worldviews that provide meaning, order, and the promise of personal significance. These worldviews not only orient individuals within a shared reality but also serve as symbolic defenses against death anxiety. Consequently, human motivation is fundamentally tied to sustaining the belief that life has purpose and that one’s existence has value. When these worldviews are challenged—or when mortality becomes salient—individuals typically respond with defensive strategies aimed at reestablishing confidence in their cultural frameworks and reaffirming their sense of worth.

This is where my work enters the conversation. If culture at large defends us against mortality, art can turn toward it. My work is centered on art that metabolizes death anxiety into meaning—not by escaping it, but by dwelling in its presence. Over the next three years, I will be creating both a dissertation and a body of work that explore how creativity can transform existential dread into something we can live with, and maybe even live more fully because of it.

From Visions in Mortality to In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: Tracing a Life’s Work

In 1993, I put together a small exhibition called Visions in Mortality. At the time, I didn’t know Ernest Becker’s work, I hadn’t read The Worm at the Core (Terror Management Theory), and Ajit Varki and Danny Brower’s book Denial was still years away from being published. But even without the theory, I knew where my compass pointed. I wanted to make art about death anxiety and existential struggles.

Looking back now, those photographs feel like an instinctive first attempt to break through the evolutionary wall of denial. I didn’t have the language for it then, but what I was doing was confronting the thing most of us spend our lives avoiding. The work wasn’t about distraction or comfort—it was about holding mortality in front of myself and anyone willing to look.

That exhibition planted a seed. It revealed what would become the through-line of my entire practice: how do we live, create, and remain human in full awareness of our impermanence?

“Gone to Seed,” Whole Plate Photogenic Drawing on vellum paper (waxed). The work was created in 2022 as part of the project titled, “In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of Othering and the Origins of Evil.”

Three decades later, In the Shadow of Sun Mountain is the mature expression of that same impulse. Where Visions in Mortality was raw, direct, and almost primal, Sun Mountain is layered—woven through with Becker’s insights on cultural worldviews, TMT’s evidence of our defensive psychology, and Varki and Brower’s claim that denial itself had to evolve in order for us to function as conscious beings.

The difference is scope. Visions in Mortality was a solitary confrontation with death, denial, and culture. Sun Mountain is a confrontation with collective denial—the way cultures rewrite history, erase peoples, and commit violence (genocide) in the name of permanence. It’s about how our fear of death doesn’t just haunt us as individuals but shapes entire societies.

But the continuity matters more than the contrast. Both projects spring from the same recognition: that art is one of the few places where denial can falter, where we can face mortality directly without looking away. That has been my practice from the beginning, whether I had the theory to explain it or not.

Now, in my doctoral studies, I’m taking this inquiry a step further. I’m asking not only how artists confront mortality differently than others, but also what that confrontation makes possible—for art, for ethics, and for the way we live together. If Visions in Mortality was the initiation and Sun Mountain the culmination, this research is the extension. It’s an attempt to turn decades of practice into a framework that others—artists, scholars, anyone willing to face the void—can use to think differently about mortality, meaning, and art.

Visions in Mortality was the beginning. Sun Mountain is the continuation. The dissertation will be the next turn in the spiral—returning to the same question from a higher vantage: what does it mean to create, to love, to exist, knowing all along that the universe is indifferent and that everything vanishes?

Mortality as the Artist’s Compass

I have come to believe that authenticity in art is not only about emotional honesty. That is part of it, of course. But for me, it is about something deeper: truth to your own existential position.

Most of us spend a lifetime borrowing meaning from somewhere else, from culture, religion, politics, or trends. We take on beliefs about life and death that make things easier to bear, whether or not they feel real to us. And then, if we are lucky or unlucky enough, something cracks those beliefs open. A death. A diagnosis. A moment when the denial stops working.

When that happens, you are left staring at your own finite reflection. The illusions peel away. The question becomes: What do I actually believe about my time here?

For an artist, that is the turning point. Once you have wrestled with your own mortality, the work changes. It stops being about what will sell or what will get likes. It stops being about fitting into someone else’s “hero system.” The work starts coming from a place that is aligned with how you actually see the world, its fragility, its cruelty, its beauty, its brevity.

That is when the art gets dangerous. Vulnerable. Alive. People can feel it, even if they cannot explain why.

Confronting death does not just strip away the noise. It reorients the compass. The art you make from that place carries the weight of your own reckoning. It is not about making peace with death. It is about making something true in its shadow.

What This Looks Like in Practice

I have seen this shift in my own work. When I started photographing massacre sites for Ghost Dance, it was not a project I chose because it was marketable. In fact, I knew it would make some people uncomfortable. I chose it because those places carried the weight of lives ended, stories erased, and the uncomfortable truth that we are standing on the bones of history. Making that work forced me to sit with my own mortality and the fact that history is a mirror, not just a record.

You see the same thing in other artists who have wrestled with death. Käthe Kollwitz lost her son in the First World War, and her work after that loss is stripped of any pretension, just raw, unfiltered grief and solidarity with those crushed by violence. There is Egon Schiele, painting feverishly as the Spanish flu closed in on him, his portraits vibrating with the urgency of someone who knows the clock is almost out of time. Or someone like David Wojnarowicz, turning his rage at the AIDS epidemic into work that was both deeply personal and politically explosive.

In each case, the confrontation with mortality burned away the excess. What was left was not pretty or safe. It was a direct transmission of how they saw the world in that moment.

That is the authenticity I am talking about. Not the buzzword. Not the marketing gimmick. The kind that comes when you have looked death in the eye and decided to make something anyway.

Why This Matters Beyond Art

This is the heartbeat of my current research. In my doctoral work, I am exploring how artists confront death anxiety differently than non-artists and what that difference reveals about the human search for meaning. Drawing on thinkers like Ernest Becker and Otto Rank, I am looking at how creative engagement with mortality does not just change the work. It changes the maker.

When an artist faces death head-on, it interrupts the psychological strategies we all use to soften the fact of our finitude. Those strategies, denial, distraction, and absorption in borrowed belief systems, are comfortable, but they keep us from living in alignment with our own worldview. Art that emerges from this confrontation is not only more personal. It is existentially authentic.

I believe this authenticity matters because it models a way of living. It shows that even in the shadow of death, and maybe especially there, it is possible to create something that is alive with meaning, stripped of illusion, and true to the person who made it.

Dissertation Adaptation

This research investigates how artists confront death anxiety differently than non-artists and the implications of this difference for understanding the human search for meaning. Building on the work of Ernest Becker, Otto Rank, and Terror Management Theory, I propose that creative engagement with mortality disrupts the culturally mediated denial systems that typically buffer individuals from the anxiety of finitude. Such engagement compels the artist to interrogate and often discard “borrowed” systems of meaning in favor of a self-authored existential position. When the resulting creative work emerges from this clarified stance, it attains what I define as existential authenticity: a coherence between the artist’s worldview and their creative expression. This authenticity is not merely aesthetic or emotional; it is the product of alignment between the maker’s lived confrontation with mortality and the work they bring into the world. In this way, the artistic process becomes both a site of meaning-making and a lived model for confronting, rather than evading, the inevitability of death.

What Art Knows About Death That We Don’t Say Out Loud

Reflections on Oscar M. Maina’s “Exploring the Motifs of Death and Immortality” (download it here)

There’s something art knows that most of us don’t say out loud—something that sits just beneath the surface of brush strokes, plates, metaphors, burial songs, and myths. It’s this: we’re terrified of death, and we make things to outlive us.

Oscar Maina’s essay, Exploring the Motifs of Death and Immortality, is a thoughtful dive into how human beings wrestle with mortality through the creative act. It echoes the very heart of what Ernest Becker wrote in The Denial of Death—that the human animal is the only creature conscious of its inevitable end, and that this awareness generates a kind of terror we spend our lives trying to manage. Art becomes one of our most powerful buffers. A symbolic immortality project.

Maina moves across cultures—African myths, biblical stories, Egyptian rituals, and metaphysical poetry—all circling the same truth: death is the great interruption. And art is how we respond. It’s how we push back. It’s how we say, “Not yet.”

Otto Rank called it the artist’s neurosis—this compulsive need to create something lasting in the face of impermanence. For Rank, the artist doesn’t deny death through passive illusion like the rest of society. The artist confronts it head-on, wrestles with it, transforms it. Creation becomes an act of rebellion against disappearance.

Maina gives us examples: the Egyptian pharaoh buried with engraved scrolls, the Igbo requiring a second burial to grant the dead spiritual legitimacy, Donne and Thomas pushing back against the quiet acceptance of death, and African names passed to children as reincarnations of those lost. Whether through myth, poetry, ritual, or narrative, we’re always reaching for permanence.

And underneath it all is this longing—to be remembered, to mean something. We preserve stories, carve stone, paint skin, and etch memory onto glass and paper. Not because we’re vain. Because we’re aware. We know we’re here for a moment, and the work becomes a lifeline.

Maina suggests that art and mortality are in a symbiotic relationship: we give art our fear, and it gives us back meaning. We mourn through it, remember through it, rage and reflect through it. And in return, it carries something of us forward. I connect with these ideas deeply.

Becker believed that human civilization itself is a structure of death denial. But in that denial, especially in the creative act, there’s also courage. Rank saw the artist as someone who stands between two worlds: fully aware of death, and still choosing to create. Not to escape reality, but to engage with it more deeply.

Maybe that’s what art knows. That we’re dying. And that creation—real creation—isn’t about avoiding that truth. It’s about transforming it. About staring into the void and answering back.

So if you’ve ever felt that need to make something—something lasting—it’s not self-indulgence. It’s survival. It’s legacy. It’s your own quiet defiance.

And maybe, that’s enough. What do you think?

ICYMI - Are We Equipped to Have This Conversation?

This post is from October 2024, but the question still lingers: what are we really doing when we make art?

Something feels off in the way we talk about art-making today. Are we even on the same page? What is art for? What’s its function in our lives—especially now? Why do we make it? And can we sit with the hard questions when they come—about meaning, originality, and purpose? Can we actually hear the feedback without flinching?

I keep noticing this trend: artists trying to patch holes in their creative lives by borrowing someone else’s voice, someone else’s vision. Emulating a style or riding the momentum of a movement that already has weight, hoping some of that gravity will rub off.

But that’s not it. That’s not the work.

Curious where you stand with all this. Drop a comment—let’s talk.

When Death Isn’t Just Biology

What are humans afraid of? Death, meaninglessness, loneliness (isolation), and freedom. Ernest Becker and Jean-Paul Sartre made that abundantly clear.

We prefer to act as though death is easy. Vital signs, brain scans, organ failure—we turn it over to the biologists. We say, "This is where life ends," and draw a clear line. In actuality, however, human death does not exist in the sterile realm of checklists and charts. It inhabits the world of stories and symbols.

We are frightened by more than just the body shutting down. It is the breakdown of a life dominated by others. We are held to our flimsy promises of immortality by the cutting of ties. Few people knew this better than Ernest Becker. He observed that we create our morals, our art, and our cultures as defenses against the inevitable death. We try our hardest to hide that terrible reality and to act as though our existence is more than a passing biological fad.

It is possible to declare a body on a ventilator brain-dead. It's done biologically. However, to the living, it can still be a person, a narrative, or a strand in the web we weave to keep the abyss at bay. This is painfully evident from the paper I just read: human death is always relational, moral, legal, and practical. It is more than a simple off/on switch. It marks the end of a "life-form," a life molded by ritual, language, memory, and the vows we make to one another.

There is more than just flesh left over after a death. The tangle of obligations, relationships, and rights that keeps the deceased in our world a little while longer is all that is left. Even if they only endure as long as the memory does, they continue to firmly ground us in our denial and our attempt at symbolic immortality.

The moment when our symbolic world finally breaks and we realize that all of our illusions and buffers can only last so long may be the true threshold that we fear, rather than the boundary between flatline and heartbeat.

“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.”
— Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

What do you see holding your fear of death at bay? Do you lean on something? Or are you in a free-fall state of neuroticism? Afraid of both life and death?

Photography Was Born from Death Anxiety

In Flashes of Brilliance, Anika Burgess maps the birth of photography across the 19th century—a strange, luminous era where light first learned how to remember. But underneath the surface of these technical milestones is something deeper: the same existential terror Ernest Becker exposed in The Denial of Death. Photography, from the beginning, was a defense against our disappearance.

The daguerreotype, introduced by Louis Daguerre in 1839, wasn’t just a new technology—it was a cultural event. Suddenly, faces could outlive their flesh. Sitting for a portrait was serious business. You had to be still for minutes, sometimes longer, and the result was a haunted likeness, sealed in silver and glass. It was more than documentation—it was a bid for immortality. Becker might say it was a way to manage death anxiety by creating a symbolic self that could outlast the body.

Before Daguerre, Nicéphore Niépce spent years coaxing ghostly images from bitumen and sunlight. His exposures took days. His results were vague, barely-there impressions—like memory itself. Still, he was trying to do what we all do: leave a trace.

The real turning point came with Frederick Scott Archer’s wet collodion process in 1851. It was faster, sharper, and allowed for duplication. Suddenly, your image could exist in multiple places at once. You didn’t just resist death—you replicated yourself. The carte de visite, popularized shortly after, took this further. You could hand out tiny portraits like tokens of your existence, proof that you’d been here, that you mattered.

And it wasn’t just about faces. Flash powder brought violent light into dark rooms, revealing what the eye couldn’t see. Solar enlargers, early color processes, even underwater photography—all pushed the boundaries of time and space. Burgess notes that many photographers were driven by obsession, risk, even self-destruction. They were intoxicated by the possibility of preservation. Isn’t that what Becker called the “immortality project”? Whether through fame, art, religion, or science—we’re always trying to escape the void.

Photography, in its early years, was dangerous (read Bill Jay’s “Dangers in the Dark”). Mercury, ether, explosive chemicals. But what else would we expect from a practice rooted in anxiety? It was an alchemy fueled by fear and longing. It gave people the illusion of permanence, even as everything around them was vanishing.

Burgess’s book isn’t just a history—it’s a reminder that every photograph is a symptom of our condition. It’s a way to say: I was here. I saw. I mattered.

As someone who works with 19th-century processes today, I feel that tension every time I pour collodion or pull a plate from the fixer. The medium has always been about death. About holding onto something just long enough to believe we’re not already disappearing.

And maybe that’s the brilliance Burgess is talking about. Not just in the chemical spark of silver meeting light—but in the way humans, terrified of their own impermanence, invented a machine to freeze time.

How The Sycamore Gap Tree Stirred Emotions

I read an article from The Conversation yesterday about the felling of a sycamore tree in Britain. It was a tree that stood in a dip along Hadrian’s Wall. I encourage you to read it (link here).

Here are my thoughts.

When the Sycamore Gap tree was felled, people mourned it as if it were a living companion. On the surface, it was just a tree—an old, striking landmark framed by the British landscape. But for so many, it was an emotional anchor, the kind of place our minds use to orient us in the world. Psychology tells us that our brains don’t separate memory, emotion, and place as cleanly as we like to think. They’re tangled together, just like the roots of that sycamore.

Ernest Becker would have recognized the deeper undercurrent here. We’re always looking for ways to transcend our finitude—some symbolic form of permanence that outlasts us. A tree like Sycamore Gap becomes part of a cultural worldview, an immortal marker on our mental maps. When it’s destroyed, it cracks that illusion. People felt disoriented, even betrayed. It wasn’t just the loss of scenery—it was a reminder that nothing is safe from time’s reach.

In my own work, I circle this idea constantly: that our fear of death fuels our attachments, our art, our need for landmarks—literal and symbolic. We pin our anxieties onto places, trees, myths, hoping they’ll hold steady where we can’t. The Sycamore Gap tree stood alone on that ridge for centuries, and for a moment, it made us feel we could stand a little taller, too. Its absence leaves us staring straight at our own impermanence. That, perhaps, is why we grieve it so fiercely.