Tess Baxter

There are a lot of things coming together in this work. Going back twenty years I was producing postcards, and Hadrians Wall was an area I covered. I visited it often and read up on how it was built and how people from across Europe, as well as the native British, lived alongside it. So when this opportunity came up, I was building on that knowledge. When asked about my choice of section of wall, I said I wanted to discover a connection. So I started looking for the range of things I knew were found along the Wall, of which shrines were one. And so I chose the section between milecastles 64 and 66 on finding there was a Roman shrine near Tarraby.

The Roman Empire was polytheistic, with gods co-existing and sometimes becoming fused. In the case of Marti Cocidio, it was Mars, the red Roman god of war drawn together with Cocidius, a British tribal god in that area. ‘Coc’ probably derives from ‘coch’, which in Welsh today means ‘red’. The Tarraby shrine was entirely made up of words and textures carved in stone, and the stonework part of the print is from archive drawings made of the shrine. In the upper part of the print is a person, my son Philip, at a LARP (live action role play) event called Empire Autumn Equinox 2015 – which is the ‘across Empires’ connection in the title of the print. I remembered he had been photographed carrying a weapon and shield, which is similar to the carved figure of Cocidius at other shrines.

In addition, Mars is sometimes seen as a horned god. Hadrian’s Wall is a physical structure, but it was built by people. This print celebrates people across time who have lived and died, and their passions, be it for LARP or gods. The love they shared with others through their lives remains etched in (and here, by) those who live on.