Sitting in my Mum's chair

I'm not sure if it's because I'm getting older, but home has come to mean something different as I've aged. It's become increasingly important to have things around me that are meaningful. When I think about my Mum, I remember her being the same. Objects that belonged to people I loved, or that remind me of significant moments, are the things that give me real pleasure. Some cranberry glass that belonged to my late husband. A painting of a boat that once hung in my parents' house. As you lose people, so reminders of them become more poignant.

It's no surprise, then, that home itself has been used as a way of honouring and protecting the people we've lost.

When I was twenty, my boyfriend and I drove from Dover to Athens, stopping at a wishlist of places. One of them was Tarquinia, where the Etruscans painted the burial chambers as though they were rooms in a home. Beneath the hill at Monterozzi, six thousand tombs are cut into the rock, two hundred of them painted. Banqueters recline on couches, musicians play, and dancers move between the columns. Women appear at the feasts beside the men as equals, named in inscriptions as wives, not the segregated figures they would have been in a Greek home. The Etruscans had taken on Greek motifs, Greek myths, even the Greek alphabet, but the rooms are unmistakably their own.

At the time I was fascinated by the painting, the lively, fluid lines and the atmosphere of lightness. It was as though they were imagining their loved ones continuing to live their lives in joyful abundance.

Tarquinia - two of the painted tombs.
Further info: https://tarquiniaturismo.com

When I first came across the hogbacks, it was the pragmatism behind them that really appealed to me. They are house-shaped stones, made in northern England in the tenth century, set as grave covers in Christian churchyards for the burials of wealthy Scandinavian settlers. The carving itself was probably done in workshops where Norse and Anglian traditions had already begun to combine. They take the shape of a Scandinavian building, perhaps the great Valhalla. Long, low, with a curved ridge and rows of carved tiles down the roof, and at each gable end, almost without exception, sits a great clasping beast, bear-like, hugging the stone. The bear is the old guardian of the Norse house. But on almost every hogback the bear is muzzled: paws bound, jaws strapped. The old Norse power is retained but kept in check.

I wrote my thesis on them. Dad patiently drove me around the various sites. One I was desperate to visit was Conyers Chapel at Sockburn, on a privately owned bend of the River Tees. I had no idea how to get in. By one of those weird coincidences that turn out to be pivotal, the two sisters who lived at Sockburn bought cheese from my Mum. When Dad and I turned up at their door, their house was badly in need of repair. The sisters bred Dalmatians and had no interest in the chapel, but they handed us a huge rusty key and let us go and see for ourselves. The path was overgrown and we had to trample our way through, but when we got the door open the chapel was full of Viking-age sculpture, crosses and hogbacks, sitting there as though untouched for centuries.

Above and below: Dad’s photos of Conyers Chapel at Sockburn
I wrote my thesis about hogbacks in 1988 and couldn’t have done it without my Dad patiently driving me all around the North-East.
Something about the hogbacks got under his skin: in 1999, in his retirement, he made his own studies of the same sculptures. These are his photos of the Conyers chapel at Sockburn. I love how meticulously he numbered and organised everything. 
 

The hogbacks are sometimes said to have descended from earlier Irish house-shaped reliquaries. These were small portable shrines, carved from a single block of yew, plated in bronze and enamel, made to hold the relics of a saint. The earliest, the Emly shrine, was made in Ireland in the late seventh or early eighth century, a hundred years before the first hogbacks. It is tiny, about the length of a hand. It was probably worn around the neck of its owner, a portable house for the holy dead, going wherever its bearer went. Versions of these shrines have been found as far away as Norway and Italy, carried there by Irish pilgrims and, later, by Viking raiders.

Emly Shrine
Champlevé enamel on bronze, laid over yew wood with gilt-bronze mouldings.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA)

The impulse arrives in our own time too, in a different form. Rachel Whiteread's House, made in 1993, was a concrete cast of the inside of a Victorian terraced house in Bow, taken just before the building was demolished. Although not explicitly a memorial, I find it very moving. It's a sculpture of an ordinary home, one that most of us recognise and know. It's equally about the absence of the people who lived in it, and how a home or the objects in it can come to represent them.

We all know this. Mum's chair sits beside me in the studio. Dad's gardening hat is nearby. I look at them often and find my parents there.

Rachel Whiteread House 1993
Photo : Sue Ormerod