Moving a mummy from Connemara to Cork to Cairo: Dorothy Cross on her Kinship project
Dorothy Cross at Waterstones in Cork with a copy of her Kinship: Home book. Picture: Noel Sweeney
Launching Dorothy Cross’ new book at Waterstone’s Cork last week, John O’Halloran, the president of UCC, praised the Montenotte-born artist for her courage in taking on the project the book is based on; the restitution of a 2,000-year-old mummified man to Egypt.
“UCC is a university that really wants to support everything about diversity, equality, inclusion and belonging,” he said.
The mummy is thought to be that of a middle-aged priest from Thebes. Cross has recalled that she first heard of its existence from her Aunt May, whose husband Billy O’Donovan was a professor of Pathology at UCC; the mummy was donated to the university by a missionary priest in 1928. Five years ago, when she began making enquiries into the mummy’s whereabouts, she came to believe it was in storage at the National Museum in Dublin.
Worried that the mummy might have started to decay, Cross called to a restoration expert at a facility in Letterfrack, five miles from her current home in Killary Harbour, Co Galway, to establish what it might cost to conserve it properly. “And it turned out they had the mummy upstairs,” she says. “He’d been there for the past 12 years.”
Cross became determined to return the mummy to Egypt. She assembled a team to work with her on the project: poet and UCC librarian John Fitzgerald; arts producer Mary Hickson; and curator Maeve-Ann Austen.
Cross had previously worked with Hickson on her Heartship project, the centrepiece of the 2019 edition of the Sounds from a Safe Harbour arts festival, which Hickson directs. On that occasion, Cross famously borrowed a human heart from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and had it carried up the Lee on the LÉ James Joyce. This too was a restitution of sorts; the heart had originally been discovered in the crypt at Triskel Christchurch in 1863.
“It was days after the Heartship project that Dorothy rang me, saying, I’ve got another idea,” says Hickson. “To be honest, I’d be happy to work with Dorothy on anything.” There followed a highly complex series of diplomatic manouevres before they obtained permission to bring the mummy back to Egypt.
Originally, Cross had hoped to “place it on a ship in Ireland; sail down the Bay of Biscay, through the Straits of Gibraltar and across the Mediterranean sea, to arrive home to Cairo, with music from both cultures heralding it along the way.”
Her intention was to draw attention, as she had done with the Heartship project, to the dangers present-day migrants face in attempting to cross these waters. In the end, however, it was only possible to secure permission to transport the mummy by plane.
In 2023, arrangements were made to return the mummy from Connemara to Cork, pending its departure for Cairo, and Cross’s team rented a hearse from O’Connor’s funeral home to come and collect it. She had something of a shock when one of the two undertakers who arrived with the hearse turned out to be a relative.
“Aunt May’s daughter Margaret is my godmother – she’s still with us, aged 91 – and her nephew was one of the undertakers. It was bizarre. They arrived in beautiful black suits, and were so respectful. They stopped at the local garage, and everybody was asking, who’s dead? We told white lies, saying it was my uncle. It was easier than trying to explain why we had an Egyptian mummy in the hearse.”
The mummy, accompanied by Cross, Fitzgerald, Hickson and Austen, was finally flown to Cairo in a gilded crate on an Air Egypt flight on December 12. It is now in the possession of the Museum of Cairo.
Over the past few years, Cross has been working on a book and a film on the Kinship project. The film is a work in progress, but the book, published in a lavish edition by Lilliput Press, chronicles the whole saga from start to finish. It features a selection of Cross’ photographs, along with poems and essays by a prestigious group of writers.
The first of these is a poem called The Return by Michael D Higgins, the President of Ireland. “Michael was brilliant,” says Cross. “And his poem is beautiful. He really knew what I was trying to do.”
Cross herself contributes an essay entitled , while the nine other contributors were chosen because “they had written about loss, or some kind of displacement.” They include Max Porter, Edmund de Vaal, Sonali Deraniyagala, Hisham Matar, Philippe Sands, Ahdaf Souief, Rosemary Mahoney, John Fitzgerald and Nadia Mabrouk.
“I asked Max because he had written ” says Cross, “and Edmund because a lot of his family were killed in the Holocaust, and he wrote that beautiful book, . Sonali I asked because she wrote so beautifully about losing her husband and two young sons in the Sri Lanka tsunami in her book Wave, and Hisham Matar because of his book The Return, about his father’s disappearance in Libya.”
Cross asked Sands, a lawyer, author and activist, to contribute an essay after reading his book , which chronicles his efforts to restore the Chagos Islands to their original inhabitants. Cross contacted Mahoney because the Boston writer had rowed a skiff down the Nile in her 30s. "For our Kinship book, she wrote a very beautiful story about herself and her boyfriend walking along the edge of the Nile, picking up fragments of bones and putting them in their pockets, thinking, isn't this great? Though later on, they put them back, of course.”
Souief is one of the two Egyptian writers Cross invited to contribute. “Ahdaf is 74, and she’s extraordinary,” she says. “We met her in Cairo, and I think she scrutinised me more than anybody else I asked. But in the end, she wrote a short piece about the tradition of burial in Egypt. It's gorgeous to have her voice.”
The other Egyptian writer is Nadia Mabrouk, who contributes a poem in Arabic and English. “And then John Fitzgerald, who's been one of our team from the start, wrote a series of sonnets and had the brilliant idea of having Nadia translate them into Arabic as well.”
Fitzgerald read his work at the launch of , as did Porter, whose contribution is a highly poetic piece of experimental fiction called . Porter is no stranger to Cork, having served as artist-in-residence at the Sounds from a Safe Harbour festival in 2023, where he read from his novel . On that occasion, Porter also presented his collaboration with local actor Cillian Murphy, a short film called . Murphy will also star in , a forthcoming Netflix film adaptation of Porter’s novel .
“I’ll be returning to Cork in September as a co-curator of the festival,” says Porter. “One thing I’ve learned is that you can’t say no to Mary Hickson. Or Dorothy Cross, for that matter.”
Cross first came to mainstream attention with a project called Ghostship, which involved coating a decommissioned lightship in phosphorescent paint and mooring it in Dublin Bay for three weeks in 1999. She sees Kinship as the conclusion of a trilogy that began with that project and continued with Heartship in 2019. “I think our job is done,” she says.
It is Fitzgerald who sums up best what the return of the mummy to Egypt has come to represent. “I think it was simply a gesture of civility,” he says. “Particularly now, in a time of aggression. And for those of us involved, there’s more a sense of relief than achievement.”
- Dorothy Cross’ book is published by Lilliput Press and available at Waterstone’s. Further information: dorothycross.com
