An Unburied History of Bunhill Fields

An Unburied History of Bunhill Fields is my 2020 Honours Project, as part of the Design in Visual Communication degree at the University of Technology, Sydney.

The project aims to explore the lack of recorded history of the women buried at Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, through experiments that generate speculative stories about these women, in an attempt to fill some of the archival gaps with an alternative history of Bunhill Fields.

My interest in Bunhill Fields Burial Ground began in 2018, when I spent six months on exchange in London, and lived about 5 minutes away from the site. I would regularly walk through the burial grounds on the way to the local supermarket.

After reading James T. Hong’s article The Suspicious Archive, which describes archives as an ‘accidental collection of things’, and explores the biases inherent in the curation and preservation of archives, I became interested in exploring how this had impacted the information available on the history and stories of Bunhill Fields.

I quickly came to realise that most easily accessible sources detailing the history of the site mention the same handful of successful men over and over again, and the only women mentioned are done so in relation to their more successful husbands or sons. This frustrated me.

I wanted to celebrate the stories of women buried at Bunhill, but realised this would be difficult given that the stories of these women had been largely unrecorded, not well preserved, and were difficult to access. So I had to get creative. I came up with a series of different approaches to generate new stories for a handful of these women.

These stories take the form of a limited edition publication, comprised of 6 small volumes, each with their own visual approach to telling the reimagined and retold lives of the women of Bunhill Fields, to create a new, alternate archive, and a different version of this history.

For more information on how I created this project, check out THIS PAGE