Keith Cunningham’s artworks of skulls form a compelling body of work that engages directly with themes of mortality, materiality and the enduring human condition. Unlike traditional vanitas or memento mori imagery, Cunningham’s skulls are neither decorative nor symbolic in a conventional sense. They are treated as formal subjects: stripped-back, weighty, and unflinching in their presence. In his drawings, executed mostly in ink, the skull appears as a diminutive, concentrated structure. Cunningham renders the forms with clarity and restraint, with striking detail despite their reduced size. These skulls are quiet studies in shape, volume and negative space. The result is an object that holds the gaze, a former container of life, now emptied, yet still resonant.

In his oil paintings, the skulls become denser and more textured. Painted in muted, often earthen tones, they emerge from dark or neutral grounds, either on tables or abstract surfaces, but always deliberate in their rendering. Cunningham builds the surface carefully, with layering, scraping, reworking, creating a physicality that reinforces the gravitas of the subject. These skulls are not stylised or embellished; they are raw, direct and stripped of narrative. These works, departing from traditional artist studies, reflect Cunningham’s ongoing interest in the process of creation. The skull, as a formal motif, becomes a means of exploring not death itself but the boundary between form and emptiness, presence and disappearance.