Glass Bones: Art, Mortality, and the Human Mind

By Quinn Jacobson

The Scholar of Mortality Is Still Mortal

Why do human beings create? Why do we cling to stories, beliefs, identities, and cultures that give our lives meaning? And what happens when those stories begin to crack?

In Glass Bones, artist and writer Quinn Jacobson explores the uneasy relationship between mortality, consciousness, creativity, and meaning-making. Drawing from the work of Ernest Becker, Otto Rank, Terror Management Theory, evolutionary psychology, existential philosophy, and more than three decades of artistic practice, Jacobson examines how awareness of death shapes the human mind and the worlds we build to protect ourselves from it.

Part philosophy, part psychology, part memoir, and part art book, Glass Bones argues that creativity is more than self-expression. It is one of humanity's oldest responses to mortality. Through stories from the studio, reflections on photography and painting, and an accessible exploration of the ideas that have influenced his work, Jacobson invites readers to consider what it means to live with the knowledge that life is finite.

At its heart, Glass Bones is not a book about dying; it’s a book about living consciously in the shadow of impermanence. It explores the fragile structures of meaning that sustain us, the moments when those structures fail, and the possibility that creativity offers not an escape from mortality but a way of meeting it directly.

For artists, writers, thinkers, and anyone interested in the deeper questions of human existence, Glass Bones offers a thoughtful and deeply personal exploration of what it means to be conscious, creative, and mortal.

Hardcover
5.5 × 8.5 in.
268 pages
50 photographs, paintings, tintypes, ambrotypes, RA-4 color reversal direct prints, and mixed-media works

ISBN: 979-8-27643312-7

$35.00 USD + Shipping