Ac-Efer is inspired by the Great North Wood, a vast oak woodland which once included West Norwood, and the now culverted river Effra, which flows beneath this cemetery. Oak in Anglo-Saxon is “ac”, and “efer” is Anglo Saxon for riverbank, the possible origin of the name Effra. 

From the Middle Ages onwards, oak from the Great North Wood was coppiced for timber and charcoal. As London expanded, the woodland was cleared, so that now only small fragments of the original wood remains. Similarly, the river Effra, a tributary of the Thames, and itself fed by springs from the Great North Wood, became increasingly suburbanised to the extent that in the Victorian period it was incorporated into the London sewerage system. 

Ac-Efer honours this lost woodland and subterranean water. The fired clay pieces represent oak tree branches, arranged like the course of the river Effra and its tributaries.  While each bough has a texture formed by pressing wet clay onto a living oak tree, the use of black, fractured clay is suggestive of wood that has been cut and burned. Equally, the pieces could be perceived as relics, unearthed from a time when the Great North Wood and river Effra flourished. 

Ac-Efer was shown in “Gathering the Commons” at St Stephen’s Chapel, West Norwood Cemetery, May/June 2025 alongside work by Lucy Mayes, Catherine Morland, and Marissa Stoffer.

This work is inspired by the Great North Wood