Forms Without Life (1991) is a vitrine with several shelves containing assorted shells which directly illustrates the dilemma of collection and display. Hirst was principally a conceptual and installation artist, whose pieces often related to life and death. He produced a series of 'cabinet' pieces in 1980s/90s in which ranges of objects were presented in the type of glass case that is typical of scientific display in a museum or laboratory, including such remnants as the packaging for pharmaceutical drugs and chemicals, empty drinking glasses, cows' internal organs and fish, they also evoke the 19th- century gentleman's hobby of collecting specimens. Here beautiful exotic shells, removed from their natural environment and which Hirst bought himself from souvenir stalls in Thailand, are available to the viewer for visual and elevated aesthetic appreciation but also inaccessible behind glass and serve as a reminder of the death of the organism that once inhabited them. As Hirst once commented: "you kill things to look at them’.