The wardrobe of my parents’ bedroom has always represented a kind of purgatory for underutilised domestic items: old school copybooks, a sewing machine, a carton of miscellaneous buttons, my father’s wedding suit – nothing much to appeal to me as a child except for, on a slatted shelf higher than I was able to reach, a box of keepsakes my mother had collected before she was a mother.
Every now and again I would beg her to lift the box down and open it for me. It had a spring-loaded lid and a satin veneer, as if it ought to contain jewels, and she would lay out its items across the bedspread with hesitation and reverence.
In fact, the content was ludicrously humble. There was a pea-sized book that contained the Our Father in seven languages, a dead May-bug in a matchbox, a chunk of volcanic rock from Mount Vesuvius and, wrapped in a man-sized Kleenex, a small, flattish sod of turf. The sod, my mother told me, was a dried, compressed fragment of matter from a medieval cesspit that she had salvaged, decades earlier, from an archaeological dig.
On close inspection interesting textures revealed themselves in its surface: chaff and seeds, the carapace of a tiny beetle, blackened by the intervening centuries. When I was very young it awed me, but later on, as I became increasingly self-conscious and susceptible to influences outside of family, it transformed into a running joke: my mother’s ridiculous definition of treasure; her cherished medieval shit.
RM Block
I was reminded of the medieval shit earlier this summer, during a Zoom meeting with John Sunderland, as he leaned back in his chair to remove a small object from a ziplock bag and then leaned forward again and held it aloft to the camera. It was a short, black bone, a section of the pelvis of a pig, he said, and it had been gnawed by a rat during the Roman period, a rat that had lived nearly 2,000 years ago.
John is an artist and archaeologist who had just spent the previous month, May, working on an excavation in north Co Dublin where several significant Roman artefacts had been discovered, including an intact clay pot. The pot had made the six o’clock news and been hurried off to the National Museum of Ireland, whereas the rat-gnawed pig pelvis was of less obvious value; John had brought it home to be photographed before it would be analysed and sent away for storage.
Growing up, I never took much interest in my mother’s profession; archaeology seemed to me to consist predominantly of material that may indeed have had a great story attached but nonetheless looked like something you might scrape out of a blocked gutter; it simply could not compete with the visual culture of galleries and the world of contemporary art that became a chief focus during my formative years.
A picture is fixed in my mind of the first summer I spent working on a dig as a teenager: I am kneeling, dejectedly, in the dirt of a field that was in the earliest phase of being developed into a housing estate, poking about with a trowel at a rough circle of charred earth, the remains of a prehistoric burning pit, so the archaeologists told me. Another summer I spent long hours alone in our bathroom hunched over the side of the tub, clutching an old toothbrush, surrounded by bags of mud-caked animal bone and islands of sundered newspaper.
During the years my mother variously directed and supervised on excavations all around Cork city, it is fair to note, she found a number of precious and unique objects that I also had the chance to see and occasionally hold; there was a gold posy ring from the 17th century bearing the touching inscription as trewe to me as I am to thee, a gem-set ring brooch from the 13th century and, earliest of all, part of a timber toy boat, but these were rare, and the vast majority of material remains from her excavations were prosaic, the ancient fabrics of everyday waste and death.
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In the winter of 2021-22 my mother and John were members of a team of archaeologists, under the direction of Avril Purcell, who excavated a large site, at 92-96 North Main Street, in the heart of Cork city, to make way for student accommodation. The site extended downwards to a depth of approximately three metres below street level and yielded a total of 12 identifiable buildings from the medieval period, including stake-built, post, wattle and sill-beam timber houses.
For John the North Main Street excavation had particular significance, not least because it consisted of his favourite sort of archaeology: waterlogged. At high tide, at the lowest levels, the river would rise into the trenches and turn everything to mud, creating sloppy working conditions but increasing the likelihood of finding historical materials that had been nicely preserved. It was also a dig on his home patch, after years of travelling around the country, and overseas, for work.
John has described to me what it is like to inhabit a modern city whose subterranean realm is somewhat familiar to you. There’s a certain intimacy but also a great deal of mystery; most of the city has never been excavated, and it’s likely that there are still many sources of fascination down there, entombed in concrete.
“The streets whisper to me,” John says, “as I walk around.” Then he tells me how, whenever an urban site comes under construction, it is developer-led and hoarding is swiftly erected in the interests of health and safety but with the result that the public are shut out and never get to see the process of archaeological excavation.
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This is largely why, shortly after the dig had ended, John started to put together a proposal for a multidisciplinary collaborative project that would focus on the medieval city of Cork, and North Main Street specifically; the aim being to investigate and interpret the findings through the dual lens of archaeology and art. There may have been nothing of apparent value discovered, but this was rather the point.
Instead a great deal of plant and animal remains, ceramics, and leather, wood and metal artefacts had been exhumed and collected by archaeologists, a wealth of evidence of everyday activities from the 12th to the 14th centuries, and beyond, and this is precisely the sort of stuff that, after the appropriate analysis and cataloguing, ends up in a storage facility of the National Museum, or is necessarily discarded. And so the point of the North Main Street project was to strip down the metaphorical hoarding.
In 2024 John invited me to participate as an artist in the project. The timing was fortuitous for a couple of reasons – mainly because I saw it as an excuse to engage sincerely, at long last, with my mother’s profession, to explore the subjects that have variously driven and illuminated her over the course of her career. Now that I am in my 40s and she is in her 70s I am becoming increasingly sentimental about my mother; I am suffering sporadic attacks of remorse for all the years that I failed to think of her as a person in her own right. The time had come to learn some respect for the medieval shit.
During the research phase of the North Main Street project we would sit together at her kitchen table with a stack of archaeology books, mainly the expert reports of city excavations, and I would leaf through the large pages and listen, actually listen, while my mother talked archaeology to me.
Simultaneously I started to research the art of the Middle Ages and was soon entranced by its curious balance of ecclesiastical, visionary and capricious subject matter, by the medieval predilection for symbolism, pattern and gilding. Although Christianity, I already knew, exerted the dominant influence, I was surprised to find how much memory, bodily function and daily existence had also motivated the artists and craftsmen of the period, particularly in the form of manuscript marginalia, with its tendency toward magical thinking and wry humour. It immediately spoke to my interest in, and propensity for, narrative art and decoration.
From the beginning of the North Main Street project my attention has been focused on small, personal items: bone combs, gaming pieces, stickpins, fish hooks, pegs, jugs and keys; as well as the materials that represent the ubiquity of the natural world in the medieval city: the jawbone of a harbour porpoise, a preponderance of kitten skulls, the constant presence of weeds and trees, flies and fleas.
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I started by making a series of drawings that aimed to combine and reanimate the artefacts and remains, but at a certain point I found that I was also being guided by random experiences recounted by the archaeologists, such as Avril’s attempt to germinate an ancient hazelnut.
I started to piece together a stylised vision of the medieval city: a city that had been reclaimed from the mud; a city encircled by forest and by sea, and finally by a big wall to protect against the questionable forces of the outside world. This is what I have been doing all year: attempting to create a kind of iconography of medieval Cork; an expansive installation of painted boards in the rough form of a winged altarpiece.
While on the one hand this might seem at odds with my work to date, on the other it is an intuitive continuation of my tendency to minutely describe the material world, to itemise nature as it slowly disappears, and to try to imbue all such details with a kind of sacredness. As I researched and worked over and again I found myself thinking about how, perhaps, it is an apt moment in history to be contemplating the Dark Ages; the medieval preoccupation with plagues and war and impending apocalypse; the general trend of Christian thought toward the idea that the world had reached a critical mass of sinners and needed to be purged.
The culmination of the medieval Cork project will be an exhibition previewing on Culture Night – Friday, September 19th – at St Peter’s Church on North Main Street. St Peter’s, which is now run as an exhibition and event space, was built on the site of a medieval church and is located just a few doors down from numbers 92-96, now student accommodation, and so it was likely the place where the inhabitants of the stake-built houses went to worship.
John has found himself thinking a lot over the course of the project, he tells me, about what it means to have a truly transdisciplinary practice; to allow the innovation and imagination he employs as an artist to influence how he understands and approaches his science, and then in turn for the rigour and logic he applies to his science to be incorporated into his art.
For years he has been collecting soil and clay samples from the sites he has dug, which he is now reprocessing into pigment and organising in accordance with the Munsell soil colour chart, a universal system of classification developed in the 1930s. The result, a montage of brown squares in varying hue, is strangely powerful in its simplicity, a stratigraphy of colour. With the pigment, as well as pen, pencil, ink and oil pastel, John is making large, detailed drawings on semitranslucent Permatrace paper that reference his own site plans from the excavation and play with the language of codes and numbers typically used by archaeologists.
The exhibition will also include sculptural pieces by the UK-based glass artist Matt Durran, as well as photographs of artefacts exhumed from North Main Street, pressed flora, a sensitively assembled installation of bracken and bone, recordings of oral histories by some of the specialists involved with the excavation, and a programme of talks. We hope it will offer the public a chance not only to encounter at close quarters an archaeological excavation and its aftermath but also to appreciate the lesser-appreciated beauty of the town dweller’s detritus and what it can reveal about the daily realities of life for ordinary Corkonians, our medieval ancestors.
Sara Baume is the author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither, A Line Made by Walking, Handiwork and, most recently, Seven Steeples. Beneath Our Feet previews at St Peter’s, North Main Street, Cork, on Culture Night, then runs from Saturday, September 20th, until Wednesday, October 8th, in partnership with Cork City Council archaeologist Ciara Brett and supported by Creative Ireland
