Damnatio Memoriae - Pressed Penny Charm

Excavated, carved, buried, dug up. Roman marble statues emerge and submerge themselves into the ground without will. Forms pulled from blocks, often featuring cocks. 

Roman statues survive millennia, but certain parts prove vulnerable. Pillaged crumbling remains scatter across museums worldwide. Classical statues defaced, genitalia chiselled away with surprising consistency. 

Speculations range from Christian iconoclasm, Victorian prudishness, conquering emasculation. Defacement spans centuries and motives, religious zealots, souvenir hunters, or simple contempt for the power of the endowed. 

Damnatio Memoriae “condemnation of memory” was Rome’s official practice of erasing the dishonoured from public record. Inscriptions were chiselled out, faces re-carved, statues toppled. The defacement of the penis, the blow to the groin. An anxiety about pagan bodies, about desire made permanent in stone, the intolerable celebration of naked flesh.

The missing phallus becomes an archive of repression, marking every generation’s discomfort with the body, with the past’s unashamed sensuality. The hammer’s blow, meant to erase, instead creates a monument to absence.

Absence only confirms presence. The void points directly at what it tried to erase.

Some forms refuse deletion.

Each Pressed Penny is handmade and unique.
Dimensions range from 22–24mm in height.
Internal jumpring diameter - 5mm

Two lengths of chain available, please enquire for bespoke lengths.
Made in London