TEXT FROM ‘AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE NOSELESS SAINT’ PUBLICATION, 2024;
(installation with chained library, found dowsing stick, salted bread, bronze, books, beeswax hand, acrylic on wood, digital film projection of 35mm Lomokino shot film,  polyurethane foam sprout stick on bronze sprout nails, mud, shoes, cloth costumes)



Perhaps it all started with the belly button. An algorithmic offering of an article about how people had started wearing fake tattooed belly buttons as a way of looking like they have longer legs. As the algorithm sensed my morbid fascination, it spiralled. It knew I’d given in and ordered a small package of these false belly button tattoos. I wore them once to try and gauge the feeling. The only feeling achieved was one of sheer panic, in forgetting I was wearing it when getting ready for bed.


It was too late. Soon my phone was giving me all kinds of strange beauty fads – hacks to make faces look a different shape, bellies thinner, thighs smaller. Only one was of particular interest. Mouth tapes, to control breathing, claiming to be backed up by science. The product’s argument was if we continued the way we are going, breathing too much through our mouths, in future we may lose our need for noses. Forget about smell. What lies ahead is a world where babies are born without noses.


I thought of this world, this future, and wanted to explore a part of it, mainly through exploring some of the past. I thought of classical statues in museums that had lost their noses, and how. I thought of the ways we preserve and honour body parts. I thought about Medieval peasants and the ways they must have felt being attacked with battle injuries, diseases such as leprosy, well known for eroding of noses. I thought about how these narratives might spiral in a dark-ages algorithm of gossip and lies, the equivalent of ‘going viral’. The fear of fear and superstition. Medieval history proving the indulgence in both, maps laden with false worlds and creatures, research into all sorts of bodily experiences- and changes often marked as miracles which were the making of Saints.


Peasants in fear for their own noses would go to extreme lengths and great suffering to try to claim back some power, to prove themselves, the attachment of these bodily wrongs to higher powers, to God, and sin, strongly entertaining unreliable narration. They would scrape together their coins, and employ a guide to lead on the great pilgrimage, to lay offerings and pray at the shrine to the Noseless Saint, recorded as being canonised on their deathbed when in the place of a rotting nose, a nose said to be formed of solid silver grew back in its place.


In this investigation, shot on a Lomokino 35mm camera across about 15 different rolls, hand developed in the university dark room, the main character in the work is the pilgrim leader. The role acts as a sort of Medieval equivalent to a tour guide, who is seen at the start of the film, using a dowsing finger to lead a couple on the quest – the woman pregnant, up the mountains to the shrine, hoping it will enable longevity of their own health, as well as to receive power to their unborn baby. At the shrine they lay down ceremonial coins, as well as effigies in bronze, beeswax and bread.


I filmed scenes along the ancient Canterbury city walls, a magical bridge and Neolithic cave settlements in Albania and the back garden of a friend’s house, which had been a previous refuge. In 2017, having just graduated from uni, and with nowhere to live, my friend Will and I shared a bed in a warehouse where we would end up paying people to go on holiday to have another bed to move into for a while. We went weekly to the house to play Dungeons and Dragons, the fantasy world becoming a luxury retreat. The film scene with the sprout sticks features some of the former players, involved in a new fictional battle realm.


With using various people from my life in the work, it became interesting to see them transform to such blank canvases, -to look beyond it being my friends in silly costumes, and see only the characters and their intentions,- to bring a real Medieval man into the university for 3D scanning.


The film aims to demonstrate various ancient undertakings, and some of the tools used, as well as the rise of the pilgrim leader from having the original premonition about the noseless saint, to how some of the artefacts evolved (it was a miraculous find in the caves of Albania, to discover a twisted branch which became a perfect replica of the bronze finger dowsing rod, used in original filming, which was too heavy to take on the trip).


This evolution of artefact also fed several questions about the role of museums, institutional mockery, the real and the false. The changing status of objects when they switch between relics, metric relics. In making a film, does the status of the prop change? Does wobbling through London transporting swords and sprouts become performance? Can these props become ‘artefacts’? Are my making methods trying to create more of a permanency within objects? The artefact as a representative of an ideology, not just of individual inspirations. The artefact as a teller of time, chronology, using the potential of projecting onto the past, additionally giving an afterlife. Even filming on 35mm became an artefact of the past, the performance of developing, mixing chemicals, the wait to see what would emerge. Does an object’s status change when they live on, move, are kept close to the body? Can an object be an act? A signifier? Flagging, signalling, messaging- chains, chained libraries, chain mail, carabiners. Fixtures, fittings, piercings, bindings, locks, loops.


I had thought it had started with the belly button, but as the project was starting to prove many different practice tangents coming together, and that the study of historical fakes had been there for a long time. As a child it was my favourite game to dig up artefacts, display them, and make up stories. The best kind of museums are like a stage, showcasing bizarre everyday collections, community hoards, objects with agency, allowing a re-imagining of these spaces. Two particular examples being City Reliquary and Mmuseumm, both in New York.


City Reliquary houses traces of history of the five boroughs in cultural ephemera and relics – a book from a hairdresser with photos of every haircut he’s ever given, examples hanging from the ceiling of every type of subway handle, seltzer bottles, used pencils, confetti. Mmuseumm also focuses on unusual forms of collection: a taxonomy of cornflakes, mosquitoes killed mid bite, Styrofoam rocks, fake vomit.


Forced to re-evaluate my stage and the archival nature of my practice I thought about the trip when I’d first come across these museums, solo in New York at the end of 2019, my own sort of pilgrimage, there to research the Spook-a-Rama Ghost Train on Coney Island. I went back in 2023, another pilgrimage, this time with a friend. Together we had researched and mapped fifteen of the best places to sell pickles, and tried each place, documenting our finds. These projects act as my own sort of belief system, after growing up so remote and easing out of agoraphobia, they are their own system of proof, collection, memory. A reward and an indulgence for feeling better, always fearing the window might close. The ability and privilege to undergo the missions therefore raises the importance of the souvenir, just  without the strenuous self-torture in the Medieval idea of pilgrimage.


There’s huge differences between souvenirs that are personal, and those that are purposefully manufactured. Everywhere I went I began to notice them more, glorified objects with status change-the replica pilgrim badges in Canterbury Cathedral... the Quarr Abbey branded pie on the Isle of Wight…constant symbols of ‘Britain’ in every tourist shop around London. Reviewing my own expansive souvenir collection, there are things purchased for novelty value (badges, t-shirts, mugs, a miniature snow-globe from the Vienna snow globe museum), some given from others on trips I didn’t even experience, and those that are from a time and a place, but are just something silly but meaningful (half-burnt candles from a time on the Heath with friends, an engraved conker from a trip to Poland).


In speaking to my brother about a lack of art in our childhood, but a richness in history, we would mainly recount trips to museums, displays, Iron Age hill forts – often only insured by the remembrance of the souvenirs we’d gained from these attractions.  


The project contains purposeful anachronisms, a fake historian, prop foam sprout sticks as imagined battle weapons, the act of shimmying up a rock formation in a rainstorm to install a giant nose as a shrine. It was an attempt to merge and reclaim parts of a landscape, staging a false history in the landscape I grew up in, which allowed me to explore and engage with the idea of a landscape and the body being deeply entwined. The rural landscape can exist as refuge, a space to reclaim after trauma, to form and reform ourselves, somewhere to affirm identities or uphold ancient traditions and history, to think of a future utopia, rich folklore, and ultimately act as a base for the line between reality and fiction. It was a space which engulfed me as a child. Deep hypnosis to leave. Five Google Earth zoom outs to see the nearest neighbour, a place of isolation and imagination. Growing up in a huge era of book and blockbuster fantasies- Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings- these narratives aligned with my own visions, aided by the richness of folklore like may-pole dancing, Green Man ceremonies, burning of effigies, Morris dancers, and ritual foods. This was the norm.