Kinship: Artist Dorothy Cross on returning a mummified body to Egypt

RTÉ News​

26-05-2025

We present an extract from Kinship, the new book by celebrated artist Dorothy Cross.
Kinship is a unique undertaking in the artistic career of one of Ireland's leading artists. This book, and the artistic project it is part of, charts the act of returning a mummified body of a man to Egypt.
Kinship is the act of returning the ancient body of a mummified man to Egypt. It follows in a series of large-scale art projects created over the past three decades set in extraordinary locations such as epic natural sea pools, slate quarries, handball alleys, cathedrals and naval ships.
Ghostship (1999), where a decommissioned lightship, was painted with phosphorescent paint and glowed in Dublin Bay, creating a glimmering phantom. Lightships had once marked dangerous underwater reefs all around the coast of Ireland – floating lighthouses placed to warn passing vessels of hidden danger. They were manned by a crew who lived aboard the engineless ships, which were moored bow and stern to the seabed below. As children, our father would bring us out in our boat to visit the Daunt lightship, carrying gifts of cigarettes, fruit and newspapers to the men. By the 1990s most lightships were decommissioned and replaced by satellite buoys.
In Heartship (2019), a human heart was placed on board an Irish naval vessel, which sailed up the River Lee in Cork city. It took four years to find a human heart to borrow for the piece. Many hearts are stored in the world's anatomy departments, but laws now prohibit their use. Finally, I borrowed a heart that had been found in a crypt in Cork city in 1863 and acquired by the British army officer General Pitt Rivers, who gave his collection to the University of Oxford, where it remains to this day as the Pitt Rivers Museum. The heart, wrapped in lead, was ideal – nameless, genderless and historic – representing us all. Heartship honoured the thousands of hearts that drowned and remain on the Mediterranean seabed. The heart was held on board a ship that had rescued over 18,000 migrants while stationed in the Mediterranean. It sailed up the river in brilliant sunshine, music pulsing from the ship. The ethereal voice of Lisa Hannigan, with glass-armonica and water-phone, filled the valley. The only figure visible on board was a woman dressed in grey, wandering around the deck. Swallows flew across the bow and people gathered on the dock. The crew docked with perfect choreography – and then Lisa sang from the deck.
Listen: Dorothy Cross talks to Brendan O'Connor
Some time after Heartship, I remembered a story of an Egyptian mummy that had been in University College Cork (UCC) for decades. I had been told about it years earlier by my Aunt May. May was my father Fergus' oldest sister. She was born in 1899. Her house, Monteville, was full of treasures: a doll's-house replica of Monteville, a grand piano, a rocking horse, X-rays, damask and china, bones and intelligence. She had studied medicine during the curfews of the civil war, lying on her belly on the floor with a candle to illuminate her texts as guns fired across the city. She offered me a room in her basement to use as a studio when I graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute and returned to Ireland in 1983. Remembering her story of the Egyptian body, I felt compelled to return the body and sarcophagus to his homeland – a simple act of kinship.
Aunt May's husband, Billy O'Donovan, became professor of Pathology in the early 1940s. Building work was being done at the time in the lecture hall of the anatomy department where workers discovered a large sarcophagus containing a mummified human being. A rumour circulated that my uncle had hidden it under the floorboards. This wasn't the case however, it had been placed there for storage several years before he arrived, unbeknownst to him.
There is no such thing as ownership with cargo like this. There is guardianship and fellowship.
In the early 1900s mummified bodies were exhumed in Egypt and legally sold to collectors and museums around the world. The official version on how this body arrived in Cork is that in 1928 he was gifted by an African missionary priest to the then president of UCC. Some research was done on the mummy in the 1970s by Helen Maloney of UCC. It is the body of a man, believed to have died of natural causes, in his late forties or early fifties. He may have been a priest from Thebes. He was not high-ranking. He was not Tutankhamun. He dates from the Ptolemaic period, 332–30 BC. The sarcophagus which contained the mummy dates from 300 years earlier than the body and was originally occupied by a higher-ranking man named Hor, relatives of whom are in the Museum of Egyptology in Turin, Italy.
In 2020 I began to research and view the sarcophagus in UCC, helped by custodians there. At this time I understood that the mummy was in the National Museum in Dublin undergoing preservation treatment.
Before travelling to Dublin to view the mummy, I approached a restoration expert located near my home on the remote west coast of Ireland, to ask him about the cost of restoring such an ancient mummy. While in the office of the restoration centre, showing a photograph of the sarcophagus, I mentioned that the mummy was in Dublin. The director, however, pointed to the ceiling above my head and said, 'The mummy is not in Dublin, it is here!' It had been in storage five miles from my house for the last twelve years!
The body had been sent to Letterfrack for preservation, when students in Cork rallied to have it sent back to Egypt. It was in bad shape when it arrived in Letterfrack. A restoration expert from the British Museum stabilised it and it was then kept in humidity-controlled storage for the following years.
In the beginning things moved quickly. John FitzGerald, poet and head librarian of UCC, enabled us to view the sarcophagus, which remained in a crate under the stairs of the new library with students nonchalantly running up and down, entirely unaware that an ancient coffin lay below. In March 2022 the Kinship Group (Dorothy Cross, John FitzGerald, Mary Hickson and Maeve- Ann Austen) travelled to Cairo. We were aided by the then minister for foreign affairs, Simon Coveney, and then Irish ambassador, Sean O'Regan, in Egypt. We met with the top archaeologists and Egyptologists, notably Dr Mostafa Waziry. He was intrigued by the story of this 'Irish' mummy and agreed to have him returned, to be housed in the Museum of Egyptology in Cairo. Originally my idea for Kinship was to place the body on a ship in Ireland; to sail down the Bay of Biscay, through the Straits of Gibraltar and across the Mediterranean sea, to arrive home to Cairo – from where it had departed one hundred years earlier – with music from both cultures heralding it along the way. Kinship would draw attention to the present-day plight of thousands of migrants who, fleeing their countries, attempt to cross those waters. After these meetings in Cairo, however, it was decided, sadly, that travel had to be by air and not by ship.
In the Autumn of 2023 UCC requested the return of the body to Cork from Letterfrack. At the time we were considering a documentary film to accompany what we thought would be an imminent and systematic return. We rented the most beautiful hearse from O'Connor's Funeral Home to carry him south. It turned out the great-nephew of my cousin Margaret O'Connor, daughter of Aunt May was one of the two men who arrived that day, both dressed in black suits, to bring the body back to Cork. We arranged flowers around the crate containing the body and he was driven through the wilds of the western mountains and valleys to the south.
The idea for this book formed early in the journey. I wished to hear the voices of brilliant writers in connection with the idea of loss and migration, displacement, time and transition. To bind him in their words. I am so thrilled by the written pieces. They are varied and touching and wrap around the body of an unknown person. I would like to thank the writers for their work which illuminates the anonymity of the returning man, holding him within stories and thoughts.
There is no such thing as ownership with cargo like this. There is guardianship and fellowship. As I write, five years have passed since I was first drawn to the idea of returning this man to his homeland. It felt like such a natural and simple act. The body has now been stored for over two years in a warehouse full of university artefacts, the crate gilded in anticipation of the journey. Months have passed; licences have been sourced from the Irish and Egyptian authorities. He was laid to rest over 2000 years ago, which is a short period in relationship to time but long in relationship to our own brevity on the planet. He will return home, however long it takes.