In the winter of 2000 Aki Beam was living in London, England. She was reading early modern literature and contemplating her future employment options. Beam spent her days with engravings of memento mori informing her that in the end all choices lead to the same destination; that Death is an inevitable part of life, and it is important to always be prepared. Beam spent her evenings making an employment alphabet depicting the moment when death, as a skeleton, gathers all the workers of all stations in life, and dances with them to the grave. Explore this modern dance of death as all types of workers encounter the grim reaper in the course of their daily labours.

A note on the work: This work was inspired by the cardboard frame for the punched-out cards of a Master Labyrinth game Aki Beam received for Christmas. The individual illustrations are glued to the back of the frame and illuminated with gold paper and shiny Christmas sticker strips. Many of the later had fallen off by the time this digital edition was created. The work was also slightly water-damaged as you can see below in frames A and I. The page-images have been digitally restored for research purposes.