Gut Feelings: Fragment Found

Fragment Found is an online archive of pottery sherds, where people can upload their own finds and the personal and historical stories attached to them. Beyond the objects themselves, the project is about the act of finding – through deliberate searches or chance encounters – in sometimes strange and unexpected landscapes where old and broken things are uncovered. 

Modern waste gathers in a lay-by at the side of the road. Just behind it lies a far older accumulation of rubbish – a vast Edwardian midden. I tracked this place down, patchworking old maps and YouTube clips, using the hawthorns and slag heaps to orientate myself. From a distance it is unremarkable, until the earth falls away at your feet. 

There are holes in the ground (some deep enough to require a ladder as an escape route) where mudlarkers excavate objects buried over a century ago. Within them, domestic life lies gathered in mud. The contents of medicine cabinets, mantle pieces and dining tables have all ended up here. Few pieces have held together, most are broken. 

I collect fragments: of objects, words, thoughts and images. I don’t know what I am looking for, only that the ground offers things when I move slowly enough. A teapot spout. Bottles of every kind – beer, sauce, whisky, water, boot polish – I think about the liquids they held and the hands that held them. A ceramic hot water bottle – personalised, with a name and address. I think of their bed and its warmth. That home is now gone, in its place an Indian restaurant. Stoppers, clay pipes, a spitoon. A strange vase encrusted with little white pebbles like the harling that covered my old house: I think of the secret rush of excitement when it cascaded off our wall shattering down onto the neighbour's car. A rusted spoon. A figurine, beheaded. The edge of a plate: I think about when my brother ran towards me as I cleared the table, the sudden meeting of flesh and crockery, the skin surrounding his eye opening and that if I was to slip now my blood would mix with the white powders, pink pastes and purple inks that remain in the glass beneath my feet. I think about fragility. 

Memories – my own and others, real and imagined – resurface and convene in this haunted place.