An Egyptian mummy used to live under the floorboards at University College Cork. Dorothy Cross first heard of it from her Aunt May. It was 1983, and the pair were sharing stories in May’s Victorian house, which was full of treasures, Cross says – “a doll’s house, a rocking horse, X-rays, damask and china, bones and intelligence”.
The artist, who had recently returned from studying in San Francisco, lapped it up. It would be four decades before those memories coalesced with action to become an extraordinary artwork and a new book, Kinship: Home. In the meantime Cross would become known internationally, winning awards and representing Ireland at the Venice Biennale.
May Cross, who was born in 1899 and had studied medicine by candlelight during the Civil War, married Billy O’Donovan, who became professor of pathology at the university. Rumour had it that he had hidden the body himself, but, the artist says, it had been put there years earlier, for storage. It was discovered by builders during renovation works in the 1940s.
Cross is in her studio in Connemara, which is full of light and nature, and pieces of bone, silver, wax and gold. Her dog is snoozing at her feet. Outside, across the road, is the sea, which has featured in so many of her works, its constantly changing nature and power an intriguing presence.
In 1999, for Ghostship, Cross painted a decommissioned lightship with phosphorescent paint; it would glow after dark in Dublin Bay. The work seemed to hold time, as if the histories and memories of those who lived aboard, keeping sailors safe from maritime dangers, were somehow still there, out in the dark waters.
May’s story of the Egyptian mummy returned to Cross in 2019. The artist was driving home after the culmination of Heartship, a project that had the LÉ James Joyce sailing up the River Lee. Part of the Sounds from a Safe Harbour festival, it was carrying a relic of a human heart, to the accompaniment of music by Lisa Hannigan and Alasdair Malloy.
The ship, Cross says, had saved thousands of lives while stationed in the Mediterranean. Reports of the James Joyce’s work tend to describe those it rescued as migrants, but it is more accurate to speak of them as people who, but for the grace of chance and geography, could be any one of us.
We are living in difficult times, but where do we even begin to think about addressing the injustices of the world? How can you make a hierarchy of care?
Do you start with an elderly parent in need of medical treatment? A people expelled from their land? The attempted annihilation of an entire race?
Or what about with the repatriation of the body of a man, 2,000 years dead, his tomb looted, his origins lost, his borrowed sarcophagus transported across continents to wind up half-forgotten in Ireland?
Cross believes they are all connected. “I felt compelled to return the body to his homeland,” she says. “An act of kinship.”
Five years in the making, Kinship: Home traces through words and images this forgotten man’s journey home. Its meanings are extended through texts by writers who include Max Porter, Edmund de Waal, Hisham Matar, Michael D Higgins and Ahdaf Soueif.
There are poems, memories and thoughts, many of them moving to the point of inexpressibility. The barrister and international-law expert Philippe Sands writes of a journey to Chagos, a tiny archipelago in the Indian Ocean, the inhabitants of which were expelled in the 1960s by the United Kingdom at the request of the United States to build a military base.
In another text the American writer Rosemary Mahoney describes the strange urge to desecrate and loot, generally enabled by being thought of as souvenir gathering. (Mahoney quotes Florence Nightingale writing, “I bring home some little figures I found in the tombs.”)
“I didn’t ask them to write particularly about moving a mummy back to Egypt,” says Cross, explaining the book’s making. “It was about the notion of displacement, migration, grief ... those little tendrils towards loss that guided me towards these people.” She also hopes to make a film. “I’m still kind of floating in this.”
Kinship is not a glossy coffee-table book featuring panoramas of ancient Egypt. Instead it quietly and subtly draws you into the realer meanings of lives across the world.
Writing about the mummy, Soueif asks: “what do you do with the body once its occupant has gone?” Mummification enabled it to be the focus of the rituals at the heart of the Egyptian belief in the passage to the afterworld. “Men and women were meticulously documented working and wedding, sowing and reaping, playing and feasting so they could live their lives again in eternity.” Remove the body and the connection is lost.
The significance of what happens to your body when you die, and to your soul if you believe in such things, depends on your cultural and religious background. As explorers, archaeologists, looters and some locals plundered the tombs of Egypt, both officially and unofficially, agents buying on behalf of private and public collections around the world fed the trade.
The mummified bodies were less valuable than the jewels that some of them were festooned with. Mark Twain claimed the bodies were used as fuel for trains, although this is most likely a myth. Another myth is of cursed tombs, which Cross says stems from a mould that grew on the bodies, which those who first opened the sarcophagi breathed in.
Mummified bodies were ground up as a pigment for a shade called mummy brown, the manufacture of which didn’t end until the 1960s. Discovering the true origins of one of his often-used colours, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones buried a tube of the paint in his back garden. According to his wife, they planted a daisy on top. Depending on your world view, this is either a curiosity or a tragedy.
An extraordinary coincidence followed Cross’s decision to explore the afterlife of the Cork mummy, who had locally come to be called Cecil. Approaching a restoration expert near her own home, she was astonished to discover that it had been sent there for preservation.
“It had been in storage five miles from my house for the last 12 years. When my aunt first told me the story, she said that, when the builders found it, they opened the sarcophagus and pulled the linen off its face. That has been in my head since my 20s,” says Cross. “It went down to the bone. When they opened the box here, sure enough, that was the case.”
In the intervening years, students agitated to have the mummy returned. “It is the body of a man believed to have died of natural causes. He was not high ranking. The sarcophagus dates from 300 years earlier and had originally been occupied by a higher-ranking man named Hor. We don’t know who this man is,” says Cross, drawing on research done in the 1970s by Helen Moloney. “That makes it more important, more inclusive. It’s like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. His body represents us all.”
A project team came together, including UCC’s then librarian, John FitzGerald, the cultural producer Mary Hickson and the producer and curator Maeve-Ann Austen. Simon Coveney helped, as minister for foreign affairs, as did the cultural director Eugene Downes. Ambassadors at either end helped. An introduction to the former secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt, Mostafa Waziry, was pivotal.
It wasn’t simple. You don’t just go sending a mummy back to Egypt. Initially, Cross recalls, they said no. “We were sitting in Mostafa’s office, with a bust of Nefertiti on one side, and all these pictures, and he said, ‘We don’t want your mummy. We have too many.’”
Waziry was referring to the scale of Egypt’s continuing problems in protecting its legacies from looters, but ultimately he agreed to have him returned, to be housed in the Egyptian Museum, in Cairo.
There were many moments of frustration. “You think so many things are possible,” says Cross. “Then people say they’re not. I know it should be so simple. And yet the world, and the institutions, make it difficult.”
I ask Cross about her own opinions on the afterlife. “I don’t think it’s as glamorous as the Egyptians,’” she says. “I live in a kind of space of already nearly being there. I think it’s almost like we’re there in this life, and there is not enough acknowledgment of the relationship between the now and the then. And I do believe in powers that people negate because we’re too afraid, and because science can’t prove them.”
In some ways the complexities of quantum physics may prove such things after all. “I was very conscious of his presence,” says Cross. “When things were moving on, and he was ready to go, I did believe there was some kind of calm, a kind of exhalation, in that he got home. Someone said to me that ‘home’ is the wrong word, but I think it is a terribly, terribly powerful word to all of us. Being able to go home is a privilege.”
All cultures have their wounds, but to have your heritage taken and misunderstood on such a scale is impossible to comprehend. Through her sculptures, Cross frequently draws attention to the small in a way that underlines its enormous significance. As with her work Tread, which is on show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, in its exhibition Art as Agency, an exquisitely carved foot may emerge from a vast lump of marble: a detail that speaks volumes. In the book, a photograph of stone steps in Egypt’s Valley of the Queens has its own quiet power, the rock having been worn to slivers in places by countless now forgotten feet
Cross had initially wanted to sail the body to Egypt in a gilded ship, but that proved impossible. Instead it was sent on an aircraft. Cross is open about the setbacks and what might have been considered failures that she encountered en route to the project’s conclusion.
It is a theme that Hickson, whose Sounds from a Safe Harbour festival partnered to create the project, takes up.
“We provide space and time for artists to come together, to play, to experiment, to fail,” she says. “When it fails, a thing becomes clearer. With Kinship we could never have prescribed that there would have been a certain output. We had to be patient. This is how art should be made. It should never be forced.”
Still, so many of our funding systems require an outcome even before the process has begun. “A lot of what we do sits outside conventional funding models,” says Hickson. “We have to work a bit harder to figure that out.” Cross made and sold marvellous scarves to help fund the project.
Following the progression home of the body of the unknown Egyptian, and reading the associated writings, leads to moments that, as Seamus Heaney wrote in Postscript, “catch the heart off guard and blow it open”. Some of the pain of living comes from knowing that we are simultaneously important and not.
Cross’s remark that this mummy’s body represents us all makes a connection with the body of another man who died 2,000 years ago, to become one of the world’s most powerful symbols of humanity, however such a symbol may have been later misused.
Often, just to keep going, we slide over the huge things in our minds: the dying, the burying, the surviving, the finding of home and the losing of it. Those who like to own things may look at Kinship and wonder what or where the artwork actually is. Is it the “wow” of a moment, an object that was created, or is it the lingering effects of the knowledge that something was done?
We may discover where to begin facing the world’s injustices by checking in with our own humanity. Art like this can remind us of where to find it.
Kinship: Home, by Dorothy Cross, is published by Lilliput. Sounds from a Safe Harbour 2025 runs September 11th-14th
