St Leonards Churchyard, Hollington is known as `Church in the Wood’. It sits in the last remnants of an ancient woodland that used to cover much of the Hollington area. Churchyards are places not only of the dead – they are full of life. Few human-inhabited places are as ecologically rich as old churchyards – the land has largely stayed untouched and been managed differently to the land surrounding it offering a biodiverse area that provides much-needed green spaces in an urban environment. Such sites are also seed spaces for the rewilding a task increasingly seen as important in dealing with climate change.
All making is a collaboration
Graveyards can be a gateway to local history. The headstones provides a collective biography of local customs and cultures – they are a window into the past. By selecting older headstones that are still legible, using the sparse information of name, death date and age, you can reveal the lives of the people who lie beneath with a lot of patience and work. Time spent using local records and online genealogy databases brings the people commemorated `back to life’ and from there you can get a snapshot of the wider area and the infrastructure of people that make a community. (All credit for this research goes to @SueECide and headstone photos are being added to the FindAGrave website for others to share)
The `In-between Time’ is when the research becomes the art. The research inspires me to illustrate the hidden stories revealed by the headstones. I model the stories and watch ideas emerge step-by-step while I work through the process of 3D production. I explore the opportunities of being a landscape photographer and videographer in my collaged 3-dimensional digital spaces.
Walking in a sacred manner
Cemeteries are hotspots of biodiversity. Older cemeteries are time capsules of the complex interconnected biodiversity that surrounded them when they were created. These boxes of biodiversity are mostly untouched by the agricultural and urban development that envelop them. Beneath the surface, a 4D complex interconnected web of life thrives. As you walk among the dead you cross a live, flourishing soil biomass.