DMJ – Death Masks
This series of drawings is part of a larger project titled Tracking Blood Meridian, which explores the work of the American writer Cormac McCarthy. The sketchbook pages are developed as studies for landscape-like death masks that relate to members of the nineteenth-century Glanton gang, on whose exploits McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian is based. The drawings are thought of as ‘taphonomic’, a term coined by the Soviet palaeontologist and science-fiction author Ivan Efremov to describe the process of fossilisation by which organic matter decays and transitions from the biosphere to the lithosphere. They develop as dense material strata, interleaving and binding excised text from McCarthy’s novel with soil, dust, ash, acrylic paint, graphite, ink, coffee and detail paper.
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Kieran Cremin is a Lecturer in Architecture at Cork Centre for Architectural Education. His Architecture by Design doctoral thesis from the University of Edinburgh (2025) examined the spatial and material dimensions of Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian. Cremin also holds a Master’s in Architecture from CCAE, and since 2015, he has taught on this Master’s course, which studies European cities such as Venice, Lisbon, Naples, and Marseille, alongside the challenging topographies of Irish islands.
The article is included in the third issue of DMJournal, Storytelling.
