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.
