How can a cemetery be a space where sacred pause and creativity serve as tools for the transformational process of rejuvenation for the living, while also allowing reflection on the implications of the ability to rest, remember and forget? 

How can a graveyard manifest as a liminal space and physical coalescence of time through which we resurface into Being?

My research took me from the investigation of entanglements of family bonds and relations to a local graveyard where I sought a temporary respite, a suspension of the present’s demands, in favour of rest.

Amongst the trees and old tombstones, people passing through on their way to the underground, hospital workers on their lunch break and children playing hide and seek, I contemplated the earth underneath me as a manifestation of epochs and matters mixing and entangling. Going into the Underland through the depths of time allowed for the cemetery to become a stage for bonding, both above and beneath the earth 

There is dark matter in each of us. The unimaginable and unspeakable. Fear and grief can be blinding, while feelings of being at home and grounded can be soothing, subdued and comfortingly heartwarming. The Underland’s landscape and the human heart are both essentially unmappable terrains, in which we operate on intuition. Heart is a multi-chambered thing. Some of its cavities hold hate and fear, but others radiate love, joy and grace.

For me, the cemetery became a metaphor for the heart. A catalyst for processing the overwhelm of feelings which I attempted to turn into peace, light and revival. Listening to the shimmer in the crowns of trees and glimpses of conversations of people passing by or tending to the earth on Sunday mornings with the community members during gardening, the graveyard became a portal to the world far away from the realities beyond its gates.

I have developed this project in collaboration with a local charity called Friends of the Margravine Cemetery that takes care of the natural and historic elements on its grounds. Inspired by the Tree Walks they run, I volunteered to create a map to lead you through a spiritual and creative journey. As part of my field research, I envisioned this map as a tool to recontextualise Margravine Cemetery (London, W6) from being merely a place of rest in the afterlife to a hybrid of imagination and reality. Through this short-term activation of landscape in the form of a reflective treasure hunt, the cemetery becomes a stage for holding space for oneself and, through sharing the spatial dimension and physical labour with others, harvesting the therapeutic benefits of mutual aid and caring. Through this journey I want to inspire participants to reclaim rest during the turmoil of the present bodily living. Don’t wait till after. Rest in Life.