Acting upon Adams advice during the midterm crits for Investigation, I ended up at the Crossbones Cemetery, a five minute walk from the London Bridge. After my previous experiences at Brompton and Highgate Cemetery, I thought I knew what to expect, tall trees, winding maze-like routes, maintained gardens, beautiful yet sad angels, fresh roses on the graves and hundreds and thousands of beautiful elite gravestones of loving fathers, devoted wives, artists, actors, military personnels and even Karl Marx.
I was wrong.
When you enter Crossbones is as if time had stood still. A wild guerilla garden, the size of a tennis court, filled with curiosities… yet not a single gravestone in sight. Looking through the donated books and pamphlets one would find out why. Buried underneath the garden are 16,000 women and children. For centuries, it was the outcasts graveyard for the area formerly known as The Mint, one of London’s more poorest and the most violent of slums. The women were denied a proper burial by the church because ‘they led a life of sin’ as ‘prostitutes’.
In remembrance of the event, shrines and memorials were left behind by visitors for the nameless buried.
I had taken some paper with me to make some frottages like I had in the previous gravesites. When I realised I could not do that. I started taking photographs and painting the memorials on the previous frottages I had made.
I had not attempted to reuse my frottages before. I was trying to preserve them for some future work but I never thought I would use it in this method. My tutorial with Mariana Sameiro changed my perspective about everything. She said “Don’t be precious with your work. Let the Process guide you!” And thus, I let the Process guide me into the unknown, and rightfully so.
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