All of it happened…

A year ago I travelled to Greece with a giant embroidery in my hand luggage. Terrified it would become lost if I put it in the hold, I had enlisted the initially reluctant help of Maria at the BA call-centre.

Musical instruments can be transported with you in the cabin, I learnt. If I folded it as tightly as possible, it could just about travel as a Flügelhorn.

At security, I was made to unroll it - all 7 x 5 metres - across a temporary sea of tables that had been put together for the purpose. The officials looked on bemused and asked:

“What did you say you are doing with this?”

I’d been so busy stitching words, I hadn’t thought much about how it might feel to leave this enormous and labour-intensive piece of work behind – to bury it in an excavation trench at the end of the season. There’d be no airport adventures on the way back.

In Greece, it was hot enough for wildfires that we watched at night in the valley below. I continued to stitch more words on the embroidery - from the Greek archaeologists - and on the day before the burial, we suspended it in front of the lab, ate our lunch in its shade and in the evening invited the locals to see it. It was a celebration: of the place and its people, the embroidery, the archaeologists and the fact that this would be the last year the team would be digging here. 

The next day, at dawn, every archaeologist got up to take part in the burial. No one had to, yet everyone did.

We made an 8 minute film about the project and there are photos of the burial. If you came to the original exhibition, you may have read some of the text on the webpage  but scroll down – it’s worth finding out what the last words to be seen were.

In the middle weekend of my time in Greece, we also made a version of Breaking Bread to accompany the burial, working with Chris and Maria at the local bakery in Toumba.

All the work for this project was either buried or eaten - a year on, there’s nothing to be seen.

And yet, I have thought about it - laying safely underground - every day since.