Tracing Boundaries at Bunhill Fields
At Bunhill Fields, boundaries are not only spatial — they are visual, material, and temporal. Walking among the gravestones, I encountered not just fences or gates, but designed thresholds between what is remembered and what is lost. These limits appear not only in form, but in erosion — in the slow disappearance of typographic detail. Some letters remain sharp; others dissolve into the stone, nearly unreadable. This absence is not accidental — it is designed by time, weather, and human neglect.
The visual logic of absence tells us as much as presence. A name partially eroded might still evoke emotion, memory, and form, even if its full identity is gone. In that way, erosion itself becomes a form of boundary: a visual line between the known and the forgotten.
To explore this concept, I created a series of edited pictures and two short animations based on a single gravestone: one reconstructed the alphabet of visible letters, the other removed them by frequency — from rare (B) to common (E). These visual experiments asked: when does a name become unrecognisable? When do letters stop meaning and start simply being? At what point does memory cross the threshold into visual texture?
A gravestone drew my attention — that of Mrs Hannah Lindsey. Its inscription reads: “Relict of the late Reverend Theophilus Lindsey.” Her identity is mediated entirely through her husband’s. Her name survives in stone, but not her story. This encounter reframed my understanding of the cemetery. The question was no longer just who is remembered — but how is memory designed? In this case, through omission, indirect language, and absence. This is a conceptual boundary — one that emerges through inscription. Language, like stone, chooses what to preserve.
This reframing also resonates with how graphic design history is constructed. Scholars like Blauvelt (1994, p. 208) note that graphic design’s ephemeral nature often prevents its preservation, with archives favouring “worthy” or iconic works, while others fade unrecorded. The same happens in cemeteries: not all inscriptions survive, and not all stories are deemed worth preserving. Like design objects, gravestones undergo cultural filtration — shaped by time, value, and human intervention. Memory becomes curated.
Time, too, becomes a natural designer. It wears away what is not protected. Some names remain, not because they were carved deeper, but because someone maintained them. Preservation is a political act. And so is forgetting. This echoes how Sara Ahmed (2017, p. 15) frames citation: not just as academic method, but as feminist memory. “Citation is feminist memory,” she writes — a form of care and resistance. Perhaps it is symbolic, then, that I focused not on Reverend Lindsey’s grave, but on Hannah’s. Though reduced to “relict”, her stone became my site of attention. In that gesture lies a kind of citation — a feminist act of seeing.
References
Blauvelt, A. (1994), An Opening: Graphic Design’s Discursive Spaces, Visible Language, 28(3), pp. 208–219.
Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.