Dorothy Cross: Bringing an ancient mummy from Cork to Cairo
Dorothy Cross is currently working on her Kinship project, which will involved the return to Egypt of a mummy held at UCC.
Dorothy Cross is not known for her squeamishness, having worked with materials as unusual as cowhides, bones and a human heart to produce some of the most memorable artworks of our times. So it was not entirely surprising when it was announced in December that her next major project, Kinship, will centre on a mummified body in the Heritage Collection of University College Cork, which she intends returning to the Museum of Egyptology in Cairo in April.
Cross has been working on Kinship for the past three years, in collaboration with UCC and the arts producer Mary Hickson. The mummy, believed to be that of a middle-aged adult male - possibly a priest from Thebes - was donated to the university by the African Missions in 1928, and Cross learned of its existence through family lore.
“My uncle was Professor of Pathology at UCC,” she explains, “and lectured on the human body at a time when the mummy was kept on campus. At a certain point, the students wanted it returned to Egypt. My aunt was phoned up by the Cork Examiner, and it was implied that my uncle had hidden the mummy under the floorboards of the Anatomy Dept, which of course he had not done at all.”
Cross’s interest in organising an art project around the mummy was, she says, “a natural progression” from Heartship, a project commissioned by Hickson in 2019 in her role as director of the Sounds from a Safe Harbour Festival in Cork. For Heartship, Cross arranged for an Irish Navy vessel, the LÉ James Joyce, to carry a human heart – borrowed from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford - up the River Lee from Haulbowline, with the singer Lisa Hannigan performing live on deck.
Hickson served as artistic producer on the project, and remembers the sense of achievement felt by all involved in Heartship’s creation. “It took us four years to organise,” she says. “And when it was all over, Dorothy said, ‘That’s it now, that’s the pinnacle of my career. I’m going to take a breather.’ And then, literally a week later, she rang to say, ‘You know what? There’s a mummy in UCC…’.”
Cross had viewed the mummy in her twenties, when it was stored at UCC’s Lee Maltings premises on the Mardyke, and she began making enquiries about where it had been moved to in the meantime. She spoke to a restoration expert at Letterfrack, just miles from her present home at Killary Harbour, Connemara, hoping he could provide an estimate of what it would cost to prepare it for transport.
When she mentioned she believed the mummy to be in storage in Dublin, he corrected her. “He pointed at the ceiling, and said, ‘The mummy’s here. We’ve had it for the past twelve years.’”
Cross and Hickson approached UCC, and eventually the university agreed to return the mummy, its sarcophagus and a number of other objects, including four Canopic jars and items of cartonnage, or coverings, to the museum in Cairo. They then invited two others to join their team; the curator Maeve-Ann Austen and John Fitzgerald, who has recently retired from his position as UCC’s Director of Information Services & Librarian.
In March 2022, with the support of Simon Coveney and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Ambassador Seán O’Regan of the Irish Embassy in Egypt, all four flew to Cairo.
Cross assumed the authorities in Egypt would be delighted to have the mummy back. “In Cairo,” she says, “we met their top archaeologist, a man named Mostafa Waziri, and told him our story. John had the official UCC line, and I chimed in with my notions of heraldry and ceremony and the symbolism of the return of the mummy in the present day climate of displacement and migration, which is really at the heart of the matter with this work. But Mostafa just looked at us and said, ‘We have too many mummies already. We don’t need yours.’”
Cross then told him the more personal story of how the mummy had been stored in UCC during her uncle’s tenure as Professor of Pathology, and of how moved she had been to discover it was now being stored in the parish next to her own.
“And that’s when Mostafa took me by the hands and said, ‘Okay. We’ll have your mummy’.”
Cross hoped the mummy - which she and Hickson only ever speak of with the pronoun ‘he’ - could be conveyed to Egypt on an Irish Navy vessel. “He would have arrived in Ireland on a ship from Cairo,” says Cross, “passing through the Mediterranean, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Bay of Biscay… and I would have adored to put him on a ship and bring him back by the same route. It would have been such a poetic gesture.
"Brian Fitzgerald, the captain of the LÉ James Joyce, was very helpful, and so was Simon Coveney, the minister. But there were too many difficulties – with staff, costs and permissions – to make it practical.
“Then I thought we could ask the Egyptian navy, they have a lot of ships. But we didn’t get that far; Mostafa said he wanted the mummy sent by plane, as he’s so fragile. And as it happened, Egypt Air had just launched a direct flight from Dublin to Cairo, so now he’s going by air.”
At one point, Cross thought she could arrange for the airplane to be gilded in gold. “I thought it would have been very respectful,” she says. “But that didn’t prove to be practical either.”
Still, she can see how appropriate it is to have the mummy travel by air. “The ancient Egyptians totally believed in the afterlife, and they thought of the sun as a scarab beetle rolling in the sky, which is so spectacular. So I think flying the mummy back to Cairo is a beautiful thing to do. The important thing is that His Lordship is going home. We’ve asked Lisa Hannigan back for this project, and ideally we’ll be allowed on the runway at Dublin airport to sing him off.”
In Cairo, the mummy will be brought to a conservation facility before being laid out at the museum. “We’ll film his arrival in Cairo,” says Hickson, “and then the four of us will travel by ship down the Nile to Thebes. It’s not possible to bring the mummy on that last stage of the journey, but we can at least return his energy.”
Cross envisages Kinship eventually taking the form of a documentary film, a book of photographs and essays, and a number of artworks, including a silk sheet she has already created to cover the mummy on the flight to Egypt.
“Notionally, we hope to present some element of the project at the next Sounds from a Safe Harbour in September,” says Hickson. “We don’t know yet what that might be, but it could be a short bit of film, a piece of music, or a conversation.”
Cross is already looking beyond Kinship to her next project, a commission for the Folkestone Triennial arts festival in Kent in 2024. “They asked if I could do something, so I said, what about putting a human heart on a submarine? I had this idea of the submarine because so many people drown on the crossing from France, and it can access the depths where all those bodies lie. Again, I’ve been told it’s highly impractical to get a submarine, but I’m the kind of person who thinks anything is possible, so we’ll see.”
Beyond that again, Hickson has always dreamed of replicating the Heartship project in New York. “I can just picture the ship bearing a human heart past Ellis Island into Manhattan,” she says. “Everyone talks about how moved they were by the project in Cork; in New York, all that history of emigration would add another layer of meaning. It would just be so incredibly powerful.”
- Further information: dorothycross.com/2029-2020/kinship
