In this event, Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Helen Victoria Murray use Said the Dead as the basis for their discussion about how tactility and the symbolism of the hand can bring us closer to history, both as historians and creative practitioners. Their conversation touches on themes of archive work and literature as forms of mediumship; bodies, gender and memory in Doireann’s work; and on hands as agents of care, discipline and control in Said the Dead and the work of the Victorian Hand Project. The recording begins with audio from a short film shot with Doireann in Cork by Peter Madden.
SAID THE DEAD
In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had her birth occurred in another decade, she too might have lived within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE. It is the first of many signs. Following them, she finds herself drawn into an irresistible river of forgotten voices, those of the women who knew this place best: insistent, vivid and true. They murmur from archives and old records; they whisper from stairwells and walls. Among them – and in one figure in particular – she may find meaning, solace, rage; her own salvation, perhaps, or her own vanishing?
A work of sublime intensity and tenderness, Said the Dead breaks the boundaries between worlds – past and present, imagined and real – to make something lasting and new: an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth.
THE VICTORIAN HAND PROJECT
The Victorian Hand Project grapples with the complex legacies of the Victorian past through historical, imaginative, and creative interventions. Based at the University of the Arts, London and Lancaster University, the project explores the significance of the hand, including tactility, gesture, the medical/surgical aspects of the hand and the craft and care work done by hands. The project, in collaboration with its partners The Hunterian Museum at The Royal College of Surgeons of England and The Quilters’ Guild of the British Isles, is working with artist Ruth Singer and filmmaker Lily Ford to create textile art, a series of films inspired by their research, and a series of interactive public workshops.
Helen Victoria Murray is interdisciplinary. Helen writes across fiction, poetry and criticism. She is interested in weird houses, obsolete formats and bodies with intangible boundaries. Helen is Research Associate in Victorian Cultural and Material History at Lancaster University. Her creative work unites with her academic research through core themes of temporality, materiality and embodiment.
Joanne Begiato is Professor of History and Material Culture Studies, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. She has published widely on the history of emotions, bodies, material culture, masculinities, family, parenting, and marriage from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
Michael Brown is Lecturer in Modern British History at Lancaster University. He has published extensively on the history of medicine, surgery, asylums, emotions, bodies and war in the long nineteenth century.
Ross Cameron is a Public Engagement Fellow at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. He has published extensively on travel writing and the social, cultural and political connections between Britain and Southeastern Europe in the nineteenth century. He is currently researching the sense of touch in travel literature.
