A fascinating week in residence at Magna Fort & Roman Army Museum 🏛️
Stepping away from the city and re-planting myself in a different landscape. the pace, the land, the skies all familiar yet different. It began with a stargazing night — constellations, planets, moons, stars. the red dot is Betelgeuse, a red supergiant. the Plough (the pan-shaped one) is part of Ursa Major: seven bright stars. Humans have read the skies for divination and navigation for thousands of years a place of awe and wonder for me.
I spent the week wandering, sitting, listening - walking Hadrian’s Wall and feeling its sheer scale beneath my feet. Talking with excavation team, Geoarchaeologists, pottery specialists, Trust curators and more.
Inside the museum, fragments of a time and the people who once lived here: phallic horse charms, coins, needles, hair moss, shoes, beads. Alongside a live dig site where volunteers are still excavating the earth — a Roman dog skull among the finds.
During the Severan period, jet became popular due to Julia Domna — carved into personal objects like this betrothal medallion: a kissing couple on one side, clasped hands on the other, the Roman symbol of an agreed future marriage.
🪨 Votive offerings — half heads, faces, four-fingered feet. Mini altars to unknown gods. Sculptural stones: the hare and the hound. Fragmented face pots, sometimes comical, sometimes tender. the larger ones used as funerary vessels, holding the ashes of the dead.
So much devotion, grief, love and ritual — buried, found, held.
Thanks to
@officialvindolandatrust for this time i’m still processing. This residency is part of The Land We Walk On is generously supported by The John Ellerman Foundation, Arts Council England and Newcastle University.
