Female blue bottle flies (Animalia: Arthropoda: Insecta: Diptera: Calliphoridae: Calliphora vomitoria), a type of blow flies, lay their eggs in garbage, fecal matter or rotting flesh — as in this piece, a sockeye salmon carcass (Animalia: Chordata: Salmoniformes: Salmonidae: Oncorhynchus nerka).

Maggots (baby flies) hatch from the eggs and consume the decaying material. Once they have gone through several juvenile stages the “teenage” maggots find a place to pupate in the soil. When they have completed metamorphosis, adults emerge from their pupal cases, males and females mate, and the cycle begins again. Adult flies are important pollinators of flowering plants such as skunk cabbage and goldenrod.

When present, these flies can help establish the time of death with more accuracy than a medical examiner's estimation as the timing of their developmental stages is so well understood. A species in the same family, the common green bottle fly, Lucilia sericata, is commonly used for medical debridement of wounds, so-called “maggot therapy.”

At the end the GIF a violet-green swallow (Animalia: Chordata: Passeriformes: Hirundinidae: Tachycineta thalassina) swoops in to consume a newly emerged adult fly. I wanted viewers to move from potential disgust to a broader picture of life’s interconnectedness.

I have always been drawn to decay — with its capacity to root you in place, all senses keen. I hoped to create a work that had some of the appeal of traditional hand-drawn scientific illustrations (stippling!), but via GIF — our current go-to for expressing emotions or reactions over the internet. What’s old is new again.

In a winter storm of 1928, the logging barge ‘Pesuta’ ran aground on East Beach near Tlell, Haida Gwaii. June 2016, 88 years later, I solo-hiked out to see it. Even from a distance you can’t miss it — the Pesuta is rolled onto its side, rusted smoke stacks reaching out, broken boards of its starboard bow thrust upwards, raking across the sky.

It seems to be preserved in its death-throes, frozen in time.

But no, over the years, wave action, sandblasting winter gales, freeze and thaw, the sun’s UV, bacteria, invertebrates, even gravity... all forces acted and acting upon it to deteriorate its wood and metal, breaking it down on both a large and small scale.

I spent the afternoon exploring its textures and shapes, and that night I camped in the dunes just west of it. In the morning I loosely sketched its shapes in pencil and watercolour and photographed it from every angle. I watched ravens and bald eagles alternately using it as a lookout perch.

Back in my home studio I built a grid and spent weeks recreating one of my photographs. First in graphite, then gouache, I painted over the grid and built up that ship from nothing to its broken state, square by square, preserving the moment of that memory.

Someone told me last year that it looks like a broken heart, and I realized how broken mine was when I painted it. In re-composing this shipwreck, I was rebuilding myself as well.

My mother says I’m too sentimental. I want to keep everything and keep naively believing that certain people and things are immortal, even though I know that’s not true. Frankenflora quies is a flower I made (or ‘re-composed’) from four different preserved and disassembled plants. Not an authentic product of nature, F. quies is an artificial form that is capable of the natural process of decay.

Try as we might to defeat the maxim that nothing lasts forever, death and decay are likely to remain inevitable. And we should want them to, because only then will we have the freedom to create and rebuild whatever we want. Plants know this better than we do, waving off their beautiful blossoms one year and welcoming new blooms the next.

As we move towards a future with advanced technology, we may see new ways of preserving and reinventing the natural world. Blue flowers are a rarity in nature and a mark of human ingenuity, thanks to genetic engineering or dye, and F. quies may be another example of what nature might look like in the future with more human intervention.

That we have room for the emergence of new things is the gift we receive for learning to let go. But we don’t have to let go of some things right away, which is why F. quies is kept in the coolness of shade, away from sun exposure or moisture, so its new shape and old colour can remain for a long time.