Princess Diana Reliquary Urn, Memorial Tablets and Commemorative Plates. 1998.

In a tutorial with my third year Ceramics tutor Geoffrey Swindell, we were talking about the reliquary urns that I had made for people that I was interested in. He suggested that I should think about making a reliquary urn for some one who had died and was really well known, after all he mentioned that not many people would have heard of Philip Johnson. At that point all my urns were made from my thoughts about people who were still alive and the only really well known person that had died was Princess Diana. So I decided to make a reliquary urn based upon my thoughts about her. 

​Princess Diana claimed to be the people’s Princess and because of this I thought that it would be interesting to make a common looking reliquary urn, instead of an elaborate and glamorous one, that would be based upon old worn grave memorials that I had seen in cemeteries. The ideas for the shape of the urn came from Victorian Gothic gravestones, some in Penarth’s St Augustine’s Church graveyard. The three sided urn sits upon a three sided, three stepped ’crown’ like plinth. The three aspect alludes to the spirit, soul and body. The plinth is adorned with modelled ceramic golden acanthus leaves. Some of the leaves are upright to show that the nation was generally proud of her whilst other leaves are bowed, as a mark of respect and in a state of mourning. The whole is surmounted by a golden cross. The gold is ’rusted’ and decaying, the sides of the urn and plinth are pitted, warped and scuffed, those on the urn are blackened and the pink is somewhat faded. All of this indicates glory sadly now faded and departed. The golden cross is the handle for the lid. The gold is a symbol for royalty. Inside the urn is a lustrous silvery black heart shaped casket sitting upon purple silk. The heart shape indicates that she wanted to be queen in people’s hearts. The purple symbolises royalty and death. I placed the phrase, ’Death Becomes Her’, on the body of the urn, when I thought that death in Britain at that time seemed to have become Diana.  

​On completion of the urn I turned my attention to making Princess Diana gravestone shaped memorial tablets and commemorative plates, but using plates that I bought. The memorial tablets and commemorative plates have images associated with death. The Gothic script, the combination of her face with that of a skull, the decayed surface of the memorial tablets, the upside down darkened roses and the unopened daffodils symbols of England and Wales, all present a stripping away of any sentimentality that I felt was necessary, because I wanted to show her just as a woman who I felt died tragically before her time in a car crash.