Unearthed - Selected Works 2024-2026
Preliminary Burial Tests
In summer/autumn 2025, in preparation for making the Moorland Shroud, I created four felt samples from local white wool and buried them for three months in two contrasting locations: peatland and woodland. In each site, one sample was bundled with natural dyestuffs (onion skins, lichen, ivy root) and one was buried unbundled.
The results showed clear variation between environments, with distinct colour shifts and surface changes. The dyestuffs left visible imprints in both locations.
These tests demonstrated that extended burial can materially alter wool, forming a key rationale for the proposed year-long seasonal testing in Unearthed.
The Moorland Shroud
The Moorland Shroud (2026) is a functional burial shroud, hand-felted from locally sourced British wool. Sections of the wool have been naturally dyed with heather, alder, and iron. The shroud spent three nights buried in a peat bog, high on the moors above Hardcastle Craggs, receiving the imprint, tone, and essence of peat. Unearthed, it carries the memory of the moor.
This project explored the relationship between land, material, and ritual. It also informed my research into natural dyeing, land-based processes, and shroud design, which will be central to the Unearthed R&D project.
The Moorland Shroud is currently on show with the Peat Appreciation Society at National Trust Hardcastle Craggs, until 26th April.
The Mycelium Shroud
The Mycelium Shroud (2025) was made for the Departures exhibition at Natural Endings, an artist-led event exploring love, loss, grief and memory. Inspired by mycelium as a material, the shroud combines hand-felted naturally dark wool with pale highlights, moss, hay, and other vegetable matter, evoking dark earth, root-like systems and ecological cycles.
This work extends exploration of material and ecological processes, particularly how texture, colour, and embedded plant matter can reflect landscape and time in shroud-making.
The shroud is now used as a teaching and communal object, brought into shroud-making workshops where individuals and groups practice shrouding together. In this way, the work extends beyond a single object, acting as a connective tissue between people, land, and a growing community re-engaging with burial shrouds as acts of care, presence, and return.
The Luddenden Shroud
The Luddenden Shroud (2024), commissioned by IOU Theatre, was the first in my series of research-led burial shrouds. Made from hand-felted local wool and accompanied by a cradle woven from foraged materials, this project and the accompanying film explored place, belonging, grief and our relationship to nature.
This project laid the foundations for Unearthed, establishing both the practical techniques and conceptual approach that inform my ongoing research into shroud-making, land-based processes, and ecological and cultural significance.
The film has been shown at numerous online and in-person screening events including Lifting the Lid International Festival of Death and Dying in November 2025, and at Stroud Film Festival in March 2026.
The shroud was featured by the BBC on local and national TV and Radio, and on Dutch national television news.