I will carry your ruin by artist Juliette Venter
Title: I carry your ruin
Mixed media on canvas. Size: 29cm x 42cm
The vulture is condemned by appearance. It is rarely admired, never celebrated, yet it carries one of nature’s most sacred burdens. While other creatures hunt the living, the vulture inherits only what has already surrendered to death. Its feast is rot, it takes the spread of disease away, yet it’s seen as decay. To us, decay is something to hide, something shameful and grotesque. Yet the vulture knows that if no one consumes what is dead, death itself becomes a plague. The carcass poisons the earth, disease spreads, and life is suffocated beneath the weight of what refuses to leave. By devouring corruption, the vulture becomes an unwilling martyr, sacrificing its own beauty and reputation so that the world may remain alive. There is something profoundly human hidden in this ritual.
We, too, carry the rotting remains of old griefs, betrayals, fears, and identities that have long since died. We cling to them until they fester. The vulture reminds us that healing is rarely elegant. Sometimes something monstrous must consume what no longer serves us before new flesh can grow over old wounds.
Their violent battles over carrion are not merely hunger— its survival in its rawest form. They fight over death because life has offered them little else. Yet from their conflict emerges renewal. Every piece of flesh stripped from the carcass hastens its return to the soil, where insects, plants, and countless unseen lives begin again. What appears as destruction is, in truth, an act of creation.