Dead moths and petticoats in the crypt….
There was a feeling of something special happening in the crypt on Friday when artist Franny Swann moved her Moth Boxes into the space.
From the moment I asked Franny to share the burial chamber I’ve been working in for six weeks, I knew her work would meld into mine in a gentle, poignant collaboration.
I was right. Franny’s Moth Boxes found their own fragile splendour in the first of the four alcoves with two cabinets containing tiny, delicate drawings of dead moths sitting under the suspended petticoats as if they’d been there all the time.
The boxes themselves sit on an old, dirty crate which looks like it was left there by the last set of crinolines which swept through the crypt.
It has been a small yet profoundly moving collaboration – the dead moths speak of our transient lives in a way the pettocoats can’t – and were never meant to.
The suspended skirts are representations of the unlived lives of the young women brought to Hastings for the sea cure at the turn of the 19th century – but who died here and were buried then left by their families returning home.
I wanted to give them a taste of the frivolity and lightness of the life they never lived – while Franny’s beautiful insects remind us we are all eventually dust and bones.
It is a day of endings. Today I must dismantle my work in the crypt at 3pm. I am really sad to leave the space – it has been an emotional journey, treading gently through the fact and fiction of the past.
I won’t leave those girls there though. There is so much more to find out. I have learned of the hostels in Hastings and St leonards where young women looking for work would leave their families and come here to live in tiny, cramped quarters together. Also there were various institutions for girls in trouble and an asylum, which draws me further into this emotional excavation.
The theme of In Memoriam sits so well with my work that I cannot leave that behind either. I have decided to stay with this blog and stay with this work. Franny has a blog Footsteps…. which is a beautiful read.
Time is really creeping on. I can’t believe the opening night for In Memoriam was two weeks ago. Everything builds up to the private view and then there’s this space where the work just has to be itself, and I hover round it like I can’t quite bear to leave.
Things will change again tomorrow. My friend and fellow installation artist, Franny Swann, will join me with some new drawings of dead moths.
Together we’ll install them and see what happens. I have my camera ready to gently record whatever new interventions we shape in there.
I wonder how they’ll sit in the crypt. They have competition from 14 suspended petticoats and some very creepy distorted whisperings!
My work is very much about fragility in a corporeal world – and the quiet power of delicacy and femininity.
I look forward to sharing my strange burial chamber with dead moths – and new blood!
The crypt is really getting to me now. When I’m not there, I think about it, and when I am there I sink into the dark crevices of the distinctive space like a creature terrified of the light.
It is ghoulish, it is eerie and strange. It is all the things you would expect of a place where bodies once lay. But it has a gentle silence which is captivating and eloquent, and a quiet coolness which feels eternal and precious.
The space feels like it is working with me now – whereas at first it felt slightly ill at ease with my presence.
It doesn’t breathe or speak to me in any way except in the absence of anything in there.
It feels curiously blank – like it’s a negative area – a place which holds nothing rather than anything.
It is only a few footsteps from the ‘real’ hyper-fast modern world of cafes and seaside shops but it holds its own in time and space like nowhere else I’ve ever been.
I am learning to love the crypt – despite its long-since deceased inhabitants. It has de-mystifyed death for me in a way that perhaps I wasn’t expecting. After all, the only other occupants are the bones behind the gravestones – and they feel more animal than human in origin now.
Life and death – the ultimate rites of passage. And all they really represnt is time and space themselves. And maybe there’s really nothing to be afraid of in here. It’s what’s ‘out there’ that’s scary…….
ST MARY-IN-THE-CASTLE CRYPT
HASTINGS OLD TOWN
PRIVATE VIEW – SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 6-8PM
www.cathrynkemp.com
