Telling Stories

More mulling this week. I am torn about whether to carry on blogging under the title of In Memorium as it relates to a specific piece of work made during a residency in a crypt.

The residency finished a few weeks ago – I am embarking on new projects which at first glance seem to have little to do with the title. And then something happens which convinces me to keep going.

Last week it was ‘bumping’ into the Cross Bones Graveyard – and unconsecrated burial ground in a Southwark back street which was for medieval prostitutes – the outcast dead.

Long-dead women seem to be following me. From the Hastings crypt to the Southwark stews – and now another piece of the same vast jigsaw arrived out of the blue this week.

I have been given a vintage wedding dress by the custodian of a shut-down costume museum.

I won’t name any names because the dress, which is bizarrely in its separate component pieces, was taken home from the museum by a lady who worked there a long time ago.

The piece is from yet another anonymous source – a hugely important part of an unknown woman’s life, yet being in parts it begs the question: was it ever worn?

Was she jilted before it was finished? Or was she jilted at the altar which might explain some of the frayed appearence of the seams?

I intend laying it out and scrutinising the structure – an exploration into the genealogy of the dress and its long-dead wearer.

The Outcast Dead……………

I have been mulling over the title of my blog in recent weeks. After the ending of my residency in the crypt, I have been asking myself whether I can continue to blog as In Memorium.

The title itself speaks of memory, death and the eternal – all ideas which I explore within my work.

Rites of passage, femininity, fragility and corporeal/temporal ritual and symbolism weave through my work as well, reconstructing threads of life lived and unlived as emotional lineage and genealogy.

And so, as I mulled, it was by chance that I stumbled upon the festooned gates of a medieval burial ground in a London back street at the weekend.

A plaque announced it was Cross Bones Graveyard – once an unconsecrated burial ground for the prostitutes who worked the Southwark stews.

More long-dead women……

My work is so often drawn to the lives of women, from the stories told through the history of garments to the unlived lives of the young girls who died of TB in Hastings – and so it is again.

At the point of walking away from In Memorium, I found this well-known place; this site of unspeakable misery and neglect. This place of hurt and healing where contemporary locals have placed trinkets and charms, ribbons and flowers, hearts and poems to honour those ‘single women’ ie prostitutes who walked the brutal path between brothel and graveyard that their fortune and fate decreed; many never leaving childhood.

This flurry of ribbons, Madonnas, corn dolls, costume jewellery and a few handwritten names, are attached to the Red Gates.

It is an incredibly poignant memorial to the anonymous women and children who died here of TB, Syphilis, Vitamin D deficiency and malnutrition/neglect.

Vigils are held here, each Halloween there is a candle-lit walk to Cross Bones, honouring the ‘Winchester Geese’ (so-called because the prostitutes were licensed to ply their trade by the Bishop of Winchester), those women who lived and died in their thousands on this small patch of disused land.

The site, which became a pauper’s cemetery in the 19th century, has a strange and beautiful power – and it pulls me back into my working process almost as an act of love.