The Director's Funeral: She Hung Her Boots

London

November 2025

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She Hung Her Boots was a living funeral rehearsal presented as an autobiographical art exhibition. Conceived by Ruby Cohen Love, the installation unfolded as a retrospective of her twenties, transforming a gallery space into an intimate portrait of a life in progress.

 

Through objects, fragments of work, clothes, letters, photographs and personal ephemera, the exhibition explored how a life can be narrated through the aesthetics of parting. Each element acted as a marker of time, a witness to transformation, a reminder of everything that is carried and eventually released.

 

The exhibition invited visitors to step into Ruby’s world and experience a rehearsal of her own funeral as both a personal offering and a manifesto for Cafe Mortel. It proposed that funerals can be a site for beauty, artistry and emotional clarity, and that confronting mortality can open a deeper understanding of how we choose to live.

 

Over three days, guests moved through rooms arranged as chapters of a life: moments of joy, friendship, intimacy, collapse, recovery and reinvention. The space blended fashion, installation, sound and archive, creating a poetic meditation on memory and the ritual of letting go.

 

She Hung Her Boots marked the first public manifesto of Cafe Mortel, offering a vision for contemporary funerals shaped by art, design and tenderness. It was both a farewell to a decade and an invitation to imagine new forms of remembrance.