I’m making my installation for this tomb in West Norwood Cemetery on the Curious Trail.
In the ledgers held there, I found two sisters, Sophi and Christine Zinopoulos, who lived in New Eltham, and died in four months apart in 1941 and 1942.
Like so many in the Cemetery, their names in the ledger are that is left: many people were buried in the ‘common grave’ area – much more respectable in West Norwood, but in other places, sometimes called ‘the Potter’s Field.
So much about death is symbolic: so for me these two are symbolic of all lost graves, all incomplete mourning.
Part of the installation will be two urns – open, because empty – sheltering under the tomb. Other pots will be inscribed with Edith Sitwell’s poem still falls the rain, written just before in 1940, during the London Blitz:
“Still falls the rain
With the sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer beat
In the Potter’s Field, and the sound of the impious feet”
I’m looking forward to the installation and the events in June/July – more later on these!
Related blog entries:
pots and text
do not go gentle into that good night
