Exhumed

Co-exhibitors:

Orla Barry, Suky Best, Cleo Broda, Clare Bryan, Michael Buchanan, Lisa Cheung, Phil Coy, Pascal Dubois, Peter Dukes, Oona Grimes, Stephen Healy, Sophie Horton, Tom Humphreys, Sophie Lascelles, Lynne Marsh, Lisa Z. Morgan, Mr & Mrs Ivan Morison, Paulette Phillips, Kate Scrivener, Finlay Taylor, Adam Thompson, Shane Waltener, Sarah Woodfine

Exhumed was a haunting, site-specific exhibition that transformed the Museum of Garden History (housed in the deconsecrated church of St Mary-at-Lambeth) into a space for contemporary archaeological and botanical inquiry.

The show invited artists to dig into the layers of the site’s past, both as a place of rest for the dead and a sanctuary for plant life. The exhibition played on the tension between the lush, curated garden outside and the cold, stone memorials of the church interior. Artists used the graveyard setting to explore themes of mortality, preservation, and the "exhumation" of forgotten histories. Rather than bringing pre-made gallery pieces, the curators commissioned works designed to interact with the unique architecture of the church. For example, David Cotterrell projected "Fresco" (a digital layering of images) directly onto the church’s fabric to create a ghostly sense of architectural memory. 

Given the museum's dedication to gardening history, many works explored the relationship between human life cycles and the cyclical nature of plants, treating the museum itself as a "find" to be decoded.

Field is a nine-hour projected video timed to coincide with the opening hours of Exhumed, which was staged in the ex-parish church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, where a plaque commemorating Buckley's life sits on a vestibule wall. The film was continuously recorded from a point overlooking the location most likely to have been the scene of Buckley’s death and projected onto Buckley's plaque. It is not known where Buckley's body is buried.