‘And did those feet in ancient time?’ a solo exhibition from Caitlin Hazell 

 Thursday 4th-7th September at Nunhead Cemetery Chapel, as part of the Summer series from the FLP x Friends of Nunhead Cemetery Exhibition Program 2025.


‘And did those feet in ancient time?’ imagines the lives of those who might have existed in the cemetery grounds long before it was built in 1840. Drawing on the site’s layered histories, its inbuilt symbolism, and the aesthetics of fakery, the exhibition presents a series of fictionalised relics, artefacts, and objects from an imagined ancient past.

The cemetery itself, was built with winding paths designed to imitate “country lanes of a bygone era” and a chapel built in a neo-gothic style, looking much older than it actually is, the exhibition aims to interrogate the romanticism of rural England, the construction of nostalgia and myths of bucolic bliss, bringing the ‘bygone era’ back to life…

Through installation that weaves together multiple narratives, the viewer is positioned not only as a visitor to an exhibition, but a living history museum, activated with performances and a fictionalised 'gift shop' at the private view. Medieval pilgrimage becomes the starting point where the audience is invited to encounter the stories of peasants searching for the noseless saint, workers of the land and their tools, figures caught in battle, and the power of nature taking over the land.

The exhibition draws on archaeological methods of display, comprising reconfigured objects across a range of materials, including beeswax, bread, bronze, sea kelp, and stone. Referencing English folk rituals, Medusa, queer theory, and Western museological systems, the work also aims to draw parallels between absurdities of the present: bodily fads, queuing at the bakery, the psychology around souvenirs, and the dystopia of modern technology.