TINA FIVEASH | PHOTO ARTIST

We Could Be Immortals (2014–2024)

The afterlife, once the domain of religious and spiritual belief, is increasingly shifting into the realm of Western science. Advances in resuscitation technologies are now reviving people well beyond previous definitions of clinical death, and some return with extraordinary accounts of visions from “the other side.” These revelations invite us to reconsider the nature of consciousness—not as something that ends with physical death, but as a phenomenon that may persist beyond it.

We Could Be Immortals draws from the spiritual mystery of such near-death experiences to explore the possibility of life beyond death. Through digitally constructed, weathered, and illuminated signs—resembling billboards or neon texts—superimposed onto photographs of urban, industrial, and rural landscapes, primarily in Sydney, the series creates fictional monuments that invite projection and contemplation.

These texts appropriate fragments from popular culture, literature, and religion: from Beyoncé’s Heaven couldn’t wait for you, Ozzy Osbourne’s See You On the Other Side, and The Smiths’ There Is a Light That Never Goes Out, to cultural and religious invocations of utopia, paradise, and eternity. Recontextualised within constructed photographic environments, the signs become luminous artefacts—mediating between the ordinary and the otherworldly.

By fusing reality and fantasy into the fixed surface of the photograph, We Could Be Immortals reimagines how death, dying, and the afterlife might be pictured in contemporary culture. In doing so, the work invites enduring contemplation of subjects that resist material form—mortality, memory, and the possibility of eternity.

—Tina FiveAsh