I invited Jeremy Deller to undertake this commission for Wild Eye and once we started discussing creating a fragmentary floor mosaic, which would look like it might be an ancient mosaic which had been unearthed, I knew we should work with Coralie Turpin, a Sheffield-based mosaicist. The collaboration worked brilliantly and after a 18 month development period, the final piece was launched on 26 April 2025, as part of the new renovated and repurposed Seawatching Station, all part of Wild Eye.
Scarborough has a Roman past which is very apparent today – there are the remains of a Roman signal station on the castle headland above the site of the work and school children do an archaeological ‘big dig’ each year, looking for ancient artefacts. The work was inspired by the ancient seascape mosaics of Lod and Pompeii. Viewing Roman remains, particularly mosaics, can give us an unnerving sense of deep time, with evidence of lives like ours and wildlife we recognise existing millennia ago. If we project forward a similar timespan, we see a very uncertain future for the natural world of which we are part. Roman Mosaic c 2025, conceived by Jeremy Deller and designed and created with Coralie Turpin contains a central conundrum which is encapsulated in the title: it is a piece of contemporary archaeology made to look like an authentic relic from the past, that invites us to think about the future.
There is a ‘making of’ video and an audio podcast about the project here and a 4* Guardian review below and here.
images by Jules Lister.
Jeanine Griffin 
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