The implication that artist Marian Balfe’s memorials to her exhibited art objects present to the world of the living is… art is mortal, no matter how much the artist wants and needs it to be immortal. They bring to mind two philosophical quandaries: one to do with the sound of a falling tree in a forest where no one is there to perceive it; the other concerning vampires. Art, like the falling tree, needs an observer for it to exist in the eye, mind and memory. Falling trees make sounds, but for whom? Phenomena exist in and of themselves, so what? Even though the artworks that Marian has memorialised made it into the world to be exhibited, we don’t know if anyone really experienced them. The window to experience art is half open, where vampires crawl uninvited. In the books and film Interview with the Vampire the vampires are reluctant producers of their own kind — it’s too much work. As immortal creatures, and in the unlikely event of a stake through the heart, they wine, dine and seduce, gnawing on the world with efficiency, cleanliness, and style. Although dressed in death, the vampire has overcome death. The vampire is a product of their own death. Graceful and confident, vampires hang out and drink people. Without death to worry about, vampires are not anxious creatures or wallowing in self-deception, they just are, or in a Heidiggerian sense…. They be. They are an antidote to the living who, in their effort to not think about their imminent death, whether by misadventure, old age or whatever, go about being creatively ironical. Marian Balfe’s memorials are not sentimental, but perhaps their ironical stance in the face of death (with two-faces) is the very essence of sentimentality, in their effort to fend off and disavow death with one more laugh, as in laugh in the face of death.