While Artist-in-residence with Tetrarchs archaeologists, it soon became clear that we were in much the same business: uncovering human stories, connections and illumination. The cakes we bake may be wildly different, but we are most definitely sharing ingredients.
This project started in 2024 when I was invited to Toumba Serron in Greece to join the Archaeological team working on a neolithic excavation. This giant embroidery (7m x 5m) came about after hours of conversations with archaeologists based in the UK, Greece and across Europe. If archaeology acts as a lens, helping us understand our past and anchor ourselves in place and time, then shouldn’t we turn our attention to the people doing the work? Who are they? What of themselves do they bring to their work? How does working with such long timescales affect how they perceive time in their own lives?
At the same time, I became interested in what cannot be collected through archaeology - the nuance in a person’s life or way of being, the thoughts, beliefs and small importances that may never be articulated or become tangible. These are the things that animate a person and encourage connection with past lives, but how and when do you collect that and with what accuracy? And so, I started asking questions. Lots of them. The same ones to each archaeologist. Do you feel lucky? Do you daydream? How do you celebrate? How do you console yourself?
The generosity and thought that accompanied these answers meant that I collected beautiful fragments of each person’s life, sometimes things they’ve never said to anyone else. This has become an archive of sorts, as well as something of a weather report upon a group of people. By knowing how they all respond to the same questions, you can read the human meteorological conditions.
The title of this piece is borrowed from another phrase, used by the writer Ann Patchett. She says, ‘None of it happened and all of it’s true.’ I have swapped it around into what could be the elevator pitch for archaeology. The other words are all fragments from my conversations with archaeologists – moments of meaning and beauty which expressed nuance that made me sigh with recognition of having uncovered something. All details impossible to find in an excavation.
No matter what my question or their answer is, they amount to the same thing – how do you exist in the daily smaller ways? What stories do you tell yourself? What is important? I’ve come to believe that even these three questions lead to interchangeable answers. I like to think of these fragments as bits of conversation we are lucky enough to momentarily tune into, allowing us to consider something afresh or even to ask ourselves the better, more potent questions.
And so this embroidery, entirely handstitched in the finest of materials, will remain in Toumba Serron, where it has been buried in the excavation trench at the end of the season this year. I like to think of it as a bookmark – in which story, I cannot say. What I do know is that it will be lain directly upon the remains of lives of neolithic people, and that the thoughts, ideas and dreams of those who have been carefully working to interpret the past will lie in the dark, interrupting time’s layers. Perhaps it will never be uncovered. Or perhaps in some unknown future, it will be found, and even though the materials will have degraded, and the words become partially or entirely obscured, there will be a team of people, trying their best to make sense of this strange document, pretty sure that they can make out the word daydreaming.
