Letters to the Sin Eater

An Open Invitation to Participate in my installation work for 'Devour' exhibition, Hull, Aug/Sept 2025.

Dear friends,

This is an invitation to rhizomatic thinking about sin. Like an underground network of rhizomes beneath the surface there are untold stories, experiences, perspectives and paradoxes that are waiting to be heard.

Rhizomatic thinking values heterogeneity, multiple entry points and non-linear growth. It understands the world as a complex, dynamic and evolving interconnected web. As Lucy Inglis says in her book Milk of Paradise: A History of Opium, “notions of what is transgressive, illicit, and ultimately illegal have changed dramatically over time, and continue to change”. To take the example of Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, humans have had a profound relationship with this plant going back many thousands of years. For decades it was not illegal in the UK. It was available at local stores, given daily to babies and children, and used by all classes. That it can be highly addictive and damaging is clear and undisputed, but it can also be a huge gift. Lucy Inglis points out that many of us will end our lives dependent on it in the form of one of the fundamental drugs of palliative care - morphine. The line between vice and virtue is rarely a clear one.

My research into the origins of the women’s rights movement here in the UK has had me following some fascinating rhizomatic roots. Opium is one of them. Let me explain. My reading on Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley - author of Frankenstein and The Last Man, suggests that opium was widely used in literary circles at the time, and Mary Shelley, her husband, and their friend Lord Byron were known to have used it. Opium is one of the earliest commodities and is driven by profit - both in the illegal opium trade and the medical opiate trade. Its story is a complex one of colonialism, commodity and insatiable demand. My interest in researching opium began when I returned to the UK in 2022. I was working intensively at Fenland sites, researching the history of woad - a dye plant that used to be grown here. Yet opium poppies kept drawing my attention. I made a series of quick pencil sketches of them whilst out in the Fens - some of them containing the words “marsh ghosts of opiate miasma”. I knew little about the past extent of opium use in the Fens at the time. A year or two later I walked repeatedly amongst commercial opium poppy fields in North Lincolnshire where I was living at the time. I photographed them at all stages of their growth until they were harvested, and collected seed heads and seeds (they are exquisitely beautiful things) from a wasteland site where they were growing wild. Codeine and morphine subsequently became helpers for a family member as their health deteriorated towards death.

There are countless examples of how notions of what is transgressive, illicit and/or illegal have changed. Another example is that whilst homosexuality has been legalised in many places, there are still sixty-four countries in the world where LGBTQ+ people are criminalised. Some of these countries still issue the death penalty for private, consensual, same-sex sexual activity.

Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

On the same afternoon that a friend sent me the Open Call for Devour exhibition, I witnessed a female sparrowhawk catch, kill and devour a wood pigeon right outside my living-room window.

Following the threads of this experience I immersed myself in research about raptors, their persecution, and the surprising eco-feminist roots of the RSPB, which was founded by three extraordinary women - Emily Williamson, Etta Lemon and Eliza Phillips. Some of the leaders of the women's suffrage movement - fighting for freedom for women - wore feathers as their emblem - ignoring the cruel feather industry that exploited both birds and female employees. Feathers were hugely fashionable at the time. These female founders of the RSPB were eventually successful in ending the devastating feather trade that existed to serve women’s hunger for fashion.

Following this thread even further I came across the White Feather Movement which enlisted members of the women’s suffrage movement to shame young pacifist men into enlisting for war.

I use these examples to share how my rhizomatic research practice leads me into thinking with paradox and change, out of duality and into the shifting tides of human complexity. If it seems I have digressed a long way from the subject of Sin Eater then let me travel back now along the root and I will explain a little more about the invitation.

Why letter-writing?

Much of what we know about the women who founded the women’s movement: their day to day lives, their work, their thinking, comes from letters they wrote and received.

Letters are not instant. Rhizomatic thinking can thrive in the gaps between reading and responding. Things can brew before they come into words.

THE INVITATION

You are invited to write a letter in response to the subject of sin. I would love to hear from anyone at all - you do not need to be an artist or writer. You may wish to handwrite your letter (a rapidly dwindling practice that engages the brain in a different way), type it (which perhaps gives more anonymity), or to make a wordless drawing-letter of doodles, marks or drawings. The only rule is that you should be able to place it in an envelope and post it (the address to send it to is given at the end of this post).

What will happen with the letters?

The letters will become part of an interactive assemblage-installation work titled Sin Eater, part of Devour exhibition with The Feminine Urge Collective in Hull from 29th August to 14th September. Devour runs concurrently with the Freedom Festival (29th to 31st August), which was named for Hull’s association with the abolition of the slave trade as well as other activism on important issues.

The letters will be placed into one of the drawers in a chest of drawers which is the paradoxical container for the rhizomatic work I am making. Visitors to the exhibition will be able to open and explore the drawers at their leisure.

A chest of drawers represents many things. If you have ever opened the drawers of a loved one who has died, you will perhaps relate to the complexity of feelings and memories that a drawer can evoke. It is a private place that sometimes holds things not meant for the eyes of others. Yet drawers are also used in museums to house collections of specimens that are very much meant for the eyes of others. Here, there is an association with the devouring nature of colonial practices - both past and present. And the paradox is also present in the seeming impossibility of containing and presenting a rhizomatic exploration within a small number of boxes!

What is a Sin Eater?

Sin-Eater is inspired by the historical role of the Sin-Eater in British funerary tradition, and by two brilliant works of fiction: Margaret Atwood’s 1977 short story “The Sin-Eater” and Megan Campisi’s 2020 novel of the same name. The Sin-Eater also appeared as a story in the Misty Annual in 1985 - a ground-breaking publication that defied the norms of the time and challenged the conventions of story-telling for girls with its dark and mystical tales.

The last Sin-Eater in Britain is said to have died in 1906. A Sin-Eater was a ‘long, leane, ugly, lamentable poor raskal’ (Aubrey, 1687), usually an outcast from society, who, by eating a special ritual meal, consumed the sins of a dead person and helped them enter the afterlife rather than walk the earth as a restless spirit. The Sin-Eater was both revered and feared, and personifies our complex and contradictory relationships with death, and with our hidden desires, actions and transgressions. In Megan Campisi’s novel, Sin-Eaters were women, whilst the sparse historical record - from a time preceding women’s suffrage, when history was written by men - mentions only men.

It is believed that the tradition of Victorian funeral biscuits may have had its roots in the practice of sin-eating, but turned the sin-eating practice around: funeral biscuits were consumed so that those still living could share in the virtues and good character of the deceased. In some parts of Europe a woman of the house prepared bread which was left to rise on the linen-covered chest of the corpse. The bread was said to absorb the virtues of the deceased and was then eaten by relatives.

Little historical record remains of British sin-eaters, but there has been a resurgence of interest in their role - perhaps due to a decline of the religious confessional and the rise of secular roles which deal day-to-day with the hidden desires and actions of humans - for example therapists and internet content-moderators.

What is a sin?

Here are some of the questions that have arisen as I have been working with this material.

How has our idea of sin changed through time?

What remains taboo?

What might you want to be absolved of before you die? What might you want to confess?

Are we individually and solely responsible for our ‘sins’?

Are some sins sanctioned by society and culture and by governments?

Do some individuals become scapegoats for society at large?

If, as in the Gaian world view, we are cells in the larger organism of the earth or cosmos, how do our ‘sins’ impact the whole? … the collective, the earth?

What secret desires and longings do you want to explore before you die?

What is a secret? What needs to be a secret? What doesn’t?

What are the narratives about ‘sin’ that harm, and what are the narratives that heal?

How might we have taken on narratives about ‘sin’ that harm or constrain us?

When is the idea of sin useful? When is it not?

If you have read this far and would like to write and send a letter to be placed in the drawer, thankyou!

You may wish to reflect on the above questions as if writing to a friend, a loved one, or an enemy.

You may wish to ignore the questions and write free-form on the subject of sin.

You may wish to share a confession (real or fictional, and anonymously if you wish).

You may wish to respond through making a wordless drawing-letter.

Whatever the form of your response, it is a valuable part of the rhizomatic gathering of thoughts on the subject of sin at our current moment in time. Thankyou.