#ww1 photography

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.

Exhibition begins:  7th October 2017