I’m now at a point in my Museums Galleries Scotland funded Artist Residency at the Highlanders’ Museum (Queen’s Own Highlanders Collection) where I’m moving from research into making. It’s a stage which requires me to spend less time ‘on location’ & more time in the studio.
After collating 1408 separate files comprised of photographs from the archive, notes sent both to-and-from the front line, official documents from Buckingham Palace, official portraits, and domestic snaps etc it is a time to focus upon narratives that will saturate and direct my final exhibition.
During the last 6 months I’ve been most touched by:
- ‘traces’ left by the human hand, a note scribbled in the corner of a printed army document or the inside of a cigarette wrapper. - hand-sewn greetings cards and notes - salvaged materials used within sweetheart pin-cushions (old uniforms, sack-cloth etc) - harrowing personal accounts of life in the trenches: ‘Our wounded were streaming back, some ghastly sights; holding on arms, legs, broken and smashed’&‘All that will be left is a nation of legless, and armless, blind and helpless except those that are making money’(1917)
Alongside extracts from newspapers such as the Shipley Express and Times from 1st June 1917 describing Arras:
‘…over wires, over shell holes, past mined patches and death traps…faced a torrent of fire aimed at us’
And then there are the thoughts of historians such as E.J. Hobsbawn raising pertinent questions such as: how did ‘the era of peace, of confident bourgeois civilisation, growing wealth and western empires within itself the embryo of the era of war, revolution and crisis put an end to it?’
In parallel I’m now diving deep into materials and techniques. Exploring hand-sewn and domestic processes alongside industrial fabrication techniques. I’m locating harvested cloth (from Highland charity shops and the collection itself) and found objects.
Image 1: Beaumont Hamel - Battle of the Somme. This image was provided by Dave Chapman, Research and Volunteer Coordinator at the museum in response to our battlefield mural below it. He took this photograph on a battlefield tour and went on the tell me that the tree was used by both sides as a reference point for target indications during WW1.
Image 2: Battlefield mural created by Ardesier Primary School children as part of my Artist Residency
In our final classroom-based workshop this week we looked at Propaganda Posters and Trench Poetry.
We took inspiration from the collection at Fort George including a poem written by 8384 Private W Hendry of the 2nd Royal Scots: ‘In the Trenches, somewhere in France’
….next week we’ll take a trip to the fort itself and continue our research in-situ.
I’ve been exploring WW1 medals, honours and awards with a group of local primary school children. We’ve taken inspiration from medals found within the collection at the Highlanders Museum, Inverness.
The workshop also considered shape, design, context & colour when creating our imaginary awards.
I’m lucky to have spent some concentrated time delving into the archives (photographic + object based) at the Highlanders’ Museum at Fort George, Inverness, over the past 6 weeks. It’s provided a fascinating, funny, and at times, incredibly poignant window onto the everyday lives of families, soldiers and regiments during World War One.
Naturally there are War Diaries, which detail strategic manoeuvres and life-saving co-ordinates, but there are also highly personal notes like the one sent from son to father which signs-off ‘Your dying son’or the postcard which reads ‘God bless my DEAR DADDY at the WAR and keep him safe’
Out of this densely woven web of narratives I’m beginning to navigate some ‘pathways for expression’ which will lead to an exhibition on-site from October 2017 - March 2018.
Image: The photographs above show my working space at the museum. It’s an ‘open-studio’ of sorts where I can communicate with people visiting the site, explore ideas and get a feel for the over-arching narratives that are emerging out of my residency.
The upcoming exhibition of works from my residency at The Highlanders’ Museum (Queen’s Own Highlanders Collection) at Fort George, Scotland, has been extended into 2018.
It will now run from October 2017 - March 2018
Watch this space for further updates or follow the project blog for research posts as the story develops:
Photo credit: My research photographs show a newspaper from the archive at Fort George. ‘Prisoners of War’ by Jean Pierre Laurens is a testimony on the German occupation during the 1st World War.
It can be found within the Seaforths documentation (No’s 80 - 133 + 84 - 101)
