Telling Stories

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.

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

The more time I spend in the crypt, the greater the emotional impact the space has on me.

I am aware that I feel a superstitious fear about sitting in the burial site, in the actual space where bodies lay before being exhumed and moved to a room alongside this space in St Mary-In-The-Castle Crypt.

Aside from that fear though is a palpable sense of sadness, which grows and blooms the longer I stay here. At times I almost feel like I have summoned the spirits of the young women and girls whose anonymous stories I am collecting and recording.

I have drawn on the knowledge of a local historian – who tells me the predominance of young women’s bodies in this crypt was due to the girls being brought here at the start of the 19th century for the ‘sea cure’. Suffering from consumption (TB), these poor souls lasted little time and died here, in Hastings, many miles from their homes and families.

Whether it is the unlived lives of these girls, or whether it is some trace of the emotional stains of loneliness and loss, I cannot say. But the feeling grows stronger and more intense as the hours pass.

I don’t feel spooked by it. Instead, I feel a deep pathos. The first night I came home and sat in a steaming bath, weeping hot, fat tears for them all. For all the names and dates of birth and death which is really all there is of these women’s lives.

Most of them were unmarried, so lived and died without the social status or respectability marriage conferred, and so are remembered as the daughters of their father. There are scant details about them themselves.

I sit, in my small alcove, with a rather charming (borrowed) standing lamp casting a soft orange light by which I can see well enough to type. I am writing on a vintage Underwood typewriter (again borrowed from a friend) and somehow the sounds of the clacking keys and the orangey glow bring some comfort and warmth to the cold, damp space.

Maybe this corner is my refuge. Or maybe it’s the place where I call up the lost souls of the women and girls who died so young, and so alone. Maybe I am surrounded by them as I write their names, invoking them into my emotional, spiritual and physical space. Or maybe, as I was once a lost young woman myself, I connect into the yearning which, for me, was always the yearning to come home.