These works used as their main material clay tobacco pipe-shards, scavenged on mud-larking expeditions, alone, or with my love on a queer archaeology date, along the banks of the Thames. At low tide they reveal themselves in multitudes, if you’re looking for them. The process of collecting these objects, of training the eye to spot them, distinguishing them from fragments of bone or wood or their contemporary equivalent cigarette butts, choosing which to pick up and which to let lie, washing them clean of London clay in the shallows of the river, marvelling over a particularly long or wide or intriguingly marked or moulded fragment… all this is part of the work, part of the game, part of the ritual, reclaiming trash as treasure. Learning about the process of their manufacture, learning that they contain clues to their age in the thickness of a stem or the width of a bore, whilst gleefully, lovingly embracing the impossibility of knowing their true age, meaning you can insert your imagination into their hollows, dreaming that they might last have held the breath of Moll Frith or Will Kemp or some anonymous queer, this is also part of it. Breathing through them, knowing that your breath is the first to rush through that narrow passage since that of the long-dead unknown smoker who casually discarded it unknowable centuries ago… breathing is work, too. Tasting the memory of tobacco. Researching the 17th c. tobacco trade and its entanglement with early capitalism and the co-emergent kyriarchy of systemic racism, sexism, misogyny, transphobia in which we still breathe – or try to breathe – today – this too is part of the work.

Washing them, carefully. Swearing when you drop one on the floor and it shatters afresh, and realising – recalling how ghosts can haunt through the quotidian and banal – that you’re re-enacting, re-feeling the irritation of the long-ago stranger who dropped and shattered the entire pipe, shrugged, chucked the pieces into the river. Attending to that feeling, holding it in your breast, in your lungs.

Gilding them – just a careful, precious few – while listening to a podcast about King James and his Counterblaste to Tobacco, written in close proximity to his Daemonologie condemning witches. Joining up some dots. These acts of care and craft and listening, they are part of the work too. Threading them with your long-ago lopped-off hair to make strange chains which you hang from the rafters and around your neck. Freezing them in ice and watching it melt, re-revealing them, materialising time in the negative space of a bottle.

Laying them out, end to end – this is a long process, and is also part of the work, a queer archiving of the unknowable. Inventing a system of arbitrary classification, sorting them by size, length, colour. Searching for the ones that are obvious ends, to make a start with. Deciding that a fragment of bowl will generate a cross-roads in the breadcrumb trail, a new tendril searching its way across the floor.

Bursting shockingly into tears when you see them all laid out in their hundreds because each one represents an anonymous breath, a life and a death and a time and a place and now you’re their caretaker and curator and the weight of it is too heavy and beautiful. Crying is part of the work too.

Smoking through them; a respectful (I hope) riff on the traditional practice of smoking as a spiritual, meditative act of communion with ancestors and other spirits, amongst the indigenous peoples of the Americas from whom we Europeans first stole tobacco – among other things. A temporal drag act, intervening with my AFAB, trans*, transitional body in what would have been an axiomatically masculine action. Considering these long-dead smokers’ relationship to gender; performed, lived and felt. Considering my own.

A ritual flirtation, going twos-up with a ghost, sharing a companionable smoke across the centuries.

It is work without a fee, a game without rules or winners, a performance without a live audience, an artwork that can’t be bought, sold or hung on a wall, and it all feels so pointless, and so vital.

On the dirty floor of the haunted garage in Deptford, I make a map across time, across the Atlantic and back, traced in the surrogate bones of the unknowable dead.