You & I are Earth cast Porcelain cup

When the Covid Pandemic struck in 2020 I, like so many of us, became very aware of mortality. Of my own mortality and also everyone else around me. Human life felt more fragile than before and it was a rare moment for we were collectively experiencing this fragility (if we were open to sensing it) at the same time.

During the lockdown of 2020 I was musing on mortality and the process gave me comfort in a way. I felt much more connected to the people who have lived before us. I imagined how our ancestors lived, before modern medicine, in a far less cushioned existence from death. Those who lived and died during the Spanish Flu, T.B epidemics, Bubonic Plagues. I somehow found comfort in accepting that mass illness and fragility of human life has always been a very real human experience.

And so I wanted to create an object that could make these thoughts solid and came back to a 17th Century plate I had seen in 2011 at Dirt: The filthy reality of everyday life at The Wellcome Collection, with the inscription ‘You and I are Earth 1661’. On this first meeting with the plate I was struck by the message of mortality that had been communicating down the ages – all the way through 1661 to our present day and wondered how many generations the plate has ‘outlived’ in this time, how many generations have lived and died during this time?

I was also struck with the direct call ‘You and I are Earth’ as though the very material of the plate clay/earth is talking to us to remind us, we may be breathing, living flesh in this moment but at some point will become earth and clay again… So I set about making a tea cup modelled on a blue and white willow pattern cup I drink my tea from each morning, as a dedication to these ideas and a comfort in the uncertainty. You and I are Earth 2021’.

Information about the plate

The plate is currently in the collection of the Museum of London. It was made in the 17th C and discovered in Southwark when it came into the hands of J.E.Hodgkin in 1891. It has no makers mark and could possibly have been found in a sewer tributary of the Thames. The plate is significant in that it’s the earliest known English Delftware item to contain a Memento Mori motto – this was not a common theme depicted in the 17th C. I find it interesting though that memento mori sentiments were not common at this time for there were almost constant plague outbreaks in England during the 1600’s, and spookily the plates message from 1661 pre dates (as a forewarning of?) The Great Plague of London that raged between 1665 – 1666 and killed an estimated 100,000 people—almost a quarter of London’s population at the time, and which was the last major bubonic plague outbreak in England.

In talking to the previous Curator of Making at the Museum of London, it is noted on their catalogue that the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery also has a wine bottle with the same inscription which I was very excited to hear (see image). I contacted the Birmingham museum, and they informed me that although the bottle itself was also fabricated in 17thC it was actually inscribed with the You and I are Earth text in 19thC which is possibly a direct influence to the plates discovery by J.E.Hodgkin in the late 1800’s, or perhaps the motto stuck a chord with the Victorian fashion of mourning and remembrance of death. The bottle itself came from the collection of S.M.Taylor and given to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1940.