Veil is a collaboration with artist Brendan McGillicuddy. Part of the City of Edmonton’s public art collection, located at the South Haven Cemetery Administrative Building.

A large fabric-like lattice of airy line work, Veil appears to billow from the building’s rectilinear geometry. The artwork’s delicacy and flow compliment the design and materials of the building it inhabits, and is empathetic to the sensitive context of the cemetery.

To give the artwork a lifelike and graceful quality, a 3D model was developed and then manipulated by animation algorithms. These algorithms were used to stimulate wind, gravity, density, and materiality. Inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller, the triangular mesh is a metaphor for “ephemeralization”, which essentially, is doing more with less, and ultimately gives the piece a lightness and delicacy.

Evoking medieval Vanitas, or memento mori paintings, which reflect on morality, the vanity of life, and transient nature of existence, Veil is a non-denominational and universal metaphor for the contemplation of death and the temporality of life. The viewer gets to see one frozen moment in the timeline of a veil blowing in the wind, representing a delicate threshold between inside and outside but also life between death.