/Shroud/

(noun) a cloth or long, loose piece of clothing that is used to wrap a dead body before it is buried

'The Sudarium of Oviedo, or Shroud of Oviedo, is a bloodstained piece of cloth that measures c. 84 x 53 cm (33 x 21 inches). It is kept in the Cámara Santa of the Cathedral of San Salvador, Oviedo, Spain.[1] The Sudarium (Latin for sweat cloth) is believed to be the cloth that was wrapped around the head of Jesus Christ after he died as described in John 20:6-7. Radiocarbon dating conducted by the National Museum in Madrid placed the cloth’s origin to around 700 A.D. However, at the Second International Conference on the Sudarium of Oviedo, scientist César Barta noted that oil contamination could have resulted in the ascription of an inaccurate date to the object. Historical references to the Sundarium suggest the cloth existed as far back as 570 A.D. [2]These traces of contact with a body are understandably venerated. I was brought up drinking the blood of Christ and eating his body at my family's Anglican church every Sunday. There was no taboo or disgust expressed toward this symbolic practice. But the fluids of mortal strangers are another matter. All the more so in the time of COVID-19. 

Along the Thames foreshore, on the inside banks of its various bends, are tens of thousands of similar looking cloths, also stained with bodily fluids. These are wet wipes, secular relics being laid down in bands for future archaeologists to find. Designed to be super-clean, re-assuring and single-use, they rapidly become a foul and permanent part of the fabric of the Thames foreshore. 

Thames21 have been monitoring the build-up of wet wipes in Hammersmith:

“Bathymetric surveys, published for the first time, reveal that one of the largest mounds, in front of St Paul’s school in Barnes, has grown by 0.7m in the past few years, and is now 50m wide, 17m long and stands at more than 1m high.”

I photograph these rectangles of plastic fiber on location during the low tide and arrange them to seemingly hover above the ground on which they have settled. Wet wipes are probably the most defiled and disgusting plastic waste to be found in the Thames. At once intimate and horribly 'other,' they have transitioned from private and immaculate to public and abject.

We are bequeathing these odd little scraps, with their cargo of DNA and river life, to future generations. Perhaps one day they will appear, carefully lit, in museum cases alongside crusty pieces of Roman sandals and the like.