Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Day 9

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I received the canvas today and so made a start on priming it.

I also walked my new route and made a list of objects, sounds etc. The full list is as follows:

voices
a siren burst
the sun
engine starts
Leffe
zebra crossing
fat stomach
boarded windows
remnants of posters
black cloak
yellow glasses
sweet smoke
quiet street
red bus
missing letters
pencilled ‘e’
water collected in cobbles
roar of a plane
red lights
cool breeze
weeping willows
a wedding
green mound
old woman
shopping trolley
red man
heart-shaped balloon
Guinness Time
green man
fingers point
pull pull
paper cup
old confetti
cigarette butts
a siren
the sun
a flag hangs
empty racks
wheelie bins
man on a phone
doorbells
dirty water
washing hangs
a broom
plastic bottle
weir
stone tower
scaffold
dead pigeon
sun sparkles
water sounds
lifebuoy
warning!
man with walking stick
drowned bicycle
the stain of a splash
the sound of a coat
scraping tools
a barrier
a signpost
bright sun
people talk
birds twitter
footsteps
CCTV
arrow
ornate gate
traffic cones
roar of bus
music
concrete
shadow
a woman sits
tables and chairs
an empty glass
sun on plastic wrapper
trees
tinted windows
engine ticks over
bus shelter
old people queue
two yellow markers
the sound of a crossing
footsteps
blue plastic bag
graffiti
blue peeling door
sound of a child
green door
carrying shopping
man leaves door
a lamppost peers
old stone walls
plastic bag tumbles
libya libya
lamppost no.6
gutter
half-painted
weeds
hazard lights
painting a window
locks for nothing
purple trousers
a suitcase pulled
footsteps in sand
a taxi
a sapling
arrivals
fruit-boxes
music
soiled blanket
a sink
a mop
checking phone
checking leaflet
bottle top

This evening I read and recorded all the words as an MP3 file. It reminded me to some extent of the extract I published in yesterday’s entry, concerning the reading of the ‘battalion roll-call’, where ‘name after name went unanswered; each silence, another man wounded, missing or dead.’ Tomorrow, armed with this list of words, I will walk the route again, and photograph as much of what is on this original list as possible. Obviously certain things won’t be there any more, certain words on the ‘roll call’ will go ‘unanswered’. The signified objects of other words however will still be in existence, but there will be less, and these missing words will, in a way, act as metaphors for the missing men who did not answer their names in the ‘hollow square.’

I took these words and made them into one paragraph:

voices a siren burst the sun engine starts Leffe zebra crossing fat stomach boarded windows remnants of posters black cloak yellow glasses sweet smoke quiet street red bus missing letters pencilled ‘e’ water collected in cobbles roar of a plane red lights cool breeze weeping willows a wedding green mound old woman shopping trolley red man heart-shaped balloon Guinness Time green man fingers point pull pull paper cup old confetti cigarette butts a siren the sun a flag hangs empty racks wheelie bins man on a phone doorbells dirty water washing hangs a broom plastic bottle weir stone tower scaffold dead pigeon sun sparkles water sounds lifebuoy warning! man with walking stick drowned bicycle the stain of a splash the sound of a coat scraping tools a barrier a signpost bright sun people talk birds twitter footsteps CCTV arrow ornate gate traffic cones roar of bus music concrete shadow a woman sits tables and chairs an empty glass sun on plastic wrapper trees tinted windows engine ticks over bus shelter old people queue two yellow markers the sound of a crossing footsteps blue plastic bag graffiti blue peeling door sound of a child green door carrying shopping man leaves door a lamppost peers old stone walls plastic bag tumbles libya libya lamppost no.6 gutter half-painted weeds hazard lights painting a window locks for nothing purple trousers a suitcase pulled footsteps in sand a taxi a sapling arrivals fruit-boxes music soiled blanket a sink a mop checking phone checking leaflet bottle top

And then to reconstruct the walk, I joined in the gaps with more words drawn from what I remember of the afternoon.

There are voices and then a siren burst cuts through the air, just like the sun. An engine starts and in the window of the pub I see a sign for Leffe beer. I make my way to the zebra crossing and cross the road. A man with a fat stomach walks towards me. Ahead, I see the boarded windows and on them the remnants of posters pasted on and pulled off. A woman in a black cloak wearing yellow glasses walks past me and in her wake I smell the scent of sweet smoke. The quiet street is not normally like this. A red bus pulls in and restores normality. Walking past the boarded up restaurant I see the missing letters of its name. Someone has drawn around them – a pencilled ‘e’ sticks out. To my left is a road with water collected in cobbles and above me I hear the roar of a plane. The red lights stop the traffic and the cool breeze moves the weeping willows in the distance. I see a wedding party move on down the road. To my left is the green mound past which and old woman pushes her shopping trolley. The red man tells me to wait and in the distance I see a heart-shaped balloon bobbing above those who have been to the wedding. A sign on another pub reads Guinness Time and now the red man becomes a green man and I walk over the road. Fingers point, two women look at something, I don’t know what it is. To my left, up some stairs are two doors. The words pull pull invite me up the steps. I carry on walking and pick up a paper cup. On the road are remnants of old confetti and cigarette butts. I hear a siren and the sun makes its presence felt. On top of the tower, a flag hangs – there is no wind. The empty racks wait for bikes and the wheelie bins wait for rubbish. A man on a phone stands ahead of me. I walk past him and see a panel of doorbells. The river is full of dirty water and in a garden, washing hangs and a broom is propped against the wall. In the dirty river a plastic bottle is collected with other muck and litter around the weir above which the stone tower stands, surrounded in part by a scaffold. A dead pigeon lies beneath the bridge and beside it the sun sparkles. The water sounds as it pours through the weir, a lifebuoy is stored on the pavement just in case. There’s a warning! sign. A man with walking stick stands on the bridge and looks down into the water. A drowned bicycle shimmers beneath the water and on the pavement the stain of a splash colours the faded tar. A young boy walks past and the sound of a coat, one made of waterproof material is the only one for a while. Then I hear scraping tools and through a doorway leading to a yard I see a man cleaning his tools. There’s a barrier to my right and up ahead a signpost pointing somewhere. A bright sun lights up the pavement and people talk – three of them. The birds twitter unseen and footsteps ricochet around me. A CCTV signs warns me I’m being watched and a white arrow on a blue background points in another direction. A beautiful, old ornate gate stands incongruously as the traffic cones warn me of the traffic. The roar of bus after bus does not drown the music coming from above me. To my right is the concrete hulk of a building which casts a great shadow over everything. Within it, a woman sits and on the opposite side of the road a number of tables and chairs on which remains an empty glass are positioned. Here the sun on plastic wrapper make a star as trees stand lining the road. Tinted windows forbid the sun and behind me an engine ticks over. There’s a bus shelter and old people queue for their journey home. In the pavement, like gravestones, two yellow markers stand. I hear the sound of a crossing and footsteps cross from one side to the other. Near the steps is a blue plastic bag and on the walls plenty of graffiti. A blue peeling door needs a lick of paint and the sound of a child comes behind me. Up ahead on the right is a green door. A woman carrying shopping walks towards me just as a man leaves door. I notice how a lamppost peers ahead of me, looking at the old stone walls past which a small plastic bag tumbles. Someone has written libya libya on a step. Ahead is lamppost no.6 and from a wall a piece of a gutter protrudes. Two bollards, ones half-painted block the traffic. The weeds grow wherever they can and hazard lights flash on a lorry. A man is painting a window and locks for nothing remain locked around the cycle stands. A boy walks towards me in purple trousers. Another man walks with a suitcase pulled behind him. There are footsteps in sand which is sprinkled on the pavements. There’s a taxi and in its cage, a sapling. The arrivals bag a cab and fruit-boxes are piled high. There’s music and in a small yard a soiled blanket. I walk past an open door and inside I see a sink and a mop. A woman is checking phone and an elderly couple are checking leaflet. There’s a bottle top on the pavement.

A Single Death is a Tragedy

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On my way into OVADA this morning, I saw the tragic sight of a young man lying dead in the road. Evidently he’d been the victim of a traffic accident, a cyclist. What had happened isn’t clear, but it seems he was in collision with a dustbin lorry. Covered by a sheet, his feet sticking out from underneath, he lay in the road as paramedics and policemen stood around him. I have never seen a dead body before, and the sight was one both shocking and very, very sad. After these last months, working with themes such as life and death, and in particular the deaths of hundreds upon thousands of people, it was only at that moment, on seeing this poor man, that I saw just what death was. ‘A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic’ – how very true this is.

As I left the scene and made my way to the gallery, everything around me seemed heightened; colours, sounds – life in general. The everyday was for a moment rather otherworldly. People still smiled, shops were open for business, buses left the bus station. The sun shone, buildings all around remained standing: life carried on as normal, just as it always does. I suppose, this morning, I saw mortality for the first time – that, and the resilience of the city.

It was later in the day, that I became aware of something else: eternity. Just as imagining the deaths of millions of people is – to say the least – difficult, so contemplating eternity is quite impossible. However, I have always considered that the only way to contemplate the mass deaths of the Holocaust or the carnage of the battlefields of World War One, is to find the individuals caught up in the horror. In effect, one must try and break things down into smaller pieces. The same could be said of eternity, the infinite, and as I walked around town this afternoon, I was aware of the time that had passed since this morning’s tragic events, the minutes and the hours – the first minutes and hours of the dead man’s eternal rest.

The Unknown Soldier

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“The Post Office Rifles and the 6th Battalion – ‘the Cast-Iron Sixth – in turn would then pass through their lines to continue the advance to the next objectives on the downward slope of the ridge, the ‘Cough Drop,’ also known as ‘Leicester Square’, and the ‘Starfish Line’. The London Irish and the Poplar and Stepney Rifles were to lead the advance to the west of High Wood, before being succeeded by the 19th and 20th Battalions. ‘The postmen from quiet little hamlets or clerks who had spent their lives hitherto in snug offices, talked about these future regimental mortuaries with the homely names with astonishing calmness…'”

What struck me about this quote from Neil Hanson’s book, was how soldiers used the names of well known and familiar places, to name those places which were not only unfamiliar, but also terrifying, often places of horror and death on a scale which could never be imagined within those more familiar places back home. Trenches were named in a similar fashion: Oxford Circus, Oxford Street, George Street, Broad Street and so on.

“By day, the screams and groans of the wounded and dying had been drowned by the deafening clamour of the battle. At nightfall, though still counterpointed by the rumble of the guns, their pitiful cries and please for help could be hear echoing through the shattered wood…”

This quote reiterates how this war was a war of sounds; how men could be reduced to tears and much worse by sounds; those of the incessant shells or the solitary man crying in a dark wood.

“‘The reading of the battalion roll-call must have broken the hearts of all who heard it – ‘a hollow square of jaded, muddy figures… A strong voice… calls one name after another from a Roll lit by a fluttering candle, shaded by the hand of one of the remaining Sergeant Majors.’ Name after name went unanswered; each silence, another man wounded, missing or dead.'”

This very poignant passage reminded me of some text-based work I did whilst investigating the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau. These text-based pieces started as free-written prose and through a process of increasing the spacing between the letters changed to become squares where the words were reduced to a scattering of letters. As soon as I read the words ‘a hollow square’ I thought at once of those.

The Unknown Soldier

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“The Post Office Rifles and the 6th Battalion – ‘the Cast-Iron Sixth – in turn would then pass through their lines to continue the advance to the next objectives on the downward slope of the ridge, the ‘Cough Drop,’ also known as ‘Leicester Square’, and the ‘Starfish Line’. The London Irish and the Poplar and Stepney Rifles were to lead the advance to the west of High Wood, before being succeeded by the 19th and 20th Battalions. ‘The postmen from quiet little hamlets or clerks who had spent their lives hitherto in snug offices, talked about these future regimental mortuaries with the homely names with astonishing calmness…'”

“By day, the screams and groans of the wounded and dying had been drowned by the deafening clamour of the battle. At nightfall, though still counterpointed by the rumble of the guns, their pitiful cries and please for help could be hear echoing through the shattered wood…”

“‘The reading of the battalion roll-call must have broken the hearts of all who heard it – ‘a hollow square of jaded, muddy figures… A strong voice… calls one name after another from a Roll lit by a fluttering candle, shaded by the hand of one of the remaining Sergeant Majors.’ Name after name went unanswered; each silence, another man wounded, missing or dead.'”

Day 8

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Having consulted two maps (one a Google map, the other David Loggan’s map of 1675), I finally planned a new route for my ‘walking work’ which is as follows:

Gloucester Green
Chain Alley
George Street
Worcester Street
Tidmarsh Lane
St. Thomas’ Street
Paradise Street
Castle Street
Bulwarks Lane
George Street
Gloucester Place
Gloucester Green

Below are some photographs of the route of the walk:

More photographs of this route can be seen on my Flickr pages. This isn’t an area I know that well – I’m not sure if I’ve ever walked the entire length of Paradise Street – and yet afterwards, when I looked at David Loggan’s map of 1675, it all seemed very familiar. I was surprised at how much was left after the upheaval of redevelopment, particularly when standing near St. George’s tower, near the junction of St. Thomas’ and Paradise Streets. Now, looking at John Gwynn’s surveys, I could make much more sense of the Oxford of 1772.

Day 7

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I decided to do a walk today, one which I would record in single words or very short phrases. I am interested in how we relate to single words and phrases when trying to picture a past experience, particularly of someone else. The following passage from Neil Hanson’s book, ‘The Unknown Soldier,’ gives a very distinct and accurate picture of a scene one of the millions of soldiers witnessed:

“Decayed sandbags, new sandbags, boards, dropped ammunition, empty tins, corrugated iron, a smell of boots and stagnant water and burnt powder and oil and men, the occasional bang of a rifle and the click of a bolt, the occasional crack of a bullet coming over, or the wailing diminuendo of a ricochet. And over everything, the larks… and on the other side, nothing but a mud wall, with a few dandelions against the sky, until you look over the top or through a periscope and then you see the barbed wire and more barbed wire, and then fields with larks in them, and then barbed wire again.”

The simple use of words makes this passage very stark and easy to imagine. We can see it because in our own minds we can easily conjure objects such as sandbags, boards, empty tins and smells such as old boots and stagnant water. My walk around Oxford would therefore be described as a list of words.

The route was as follows:

Gloucester Green
Gloucester Place
George Street
Bulwarks Alley
New Road
Queen Street
St. Ebbe’s
Brewer Street
St. Aldates
Christ Church
Merton Grove
Deadman’s Walk
Rose Lane
High Street
Merton Street
Magpie Lane
High Street
Catte Street
Broad Street
Magdalen Street
Beaumont Street
Worcester Street
George Street
Chain Alley
Gloucester Green
In total the walk was around 4,300 steps and I wrote 631 words, some of which are listed below:
luminous jacket
suitcase
maps
market
bicycles
litter bin
jackets
mirror
coke can
boots
bicycles
taxis
sunshine – dappled
popcorn (smell)
cigarette smoked
sapling
buses
signs
“…do you remember…”
crutches
blue doors
letter box
chewing gum
‘topiaried’ trees
restaurants
cobbles
gutter
spire
bicycle
crunching wheels
cigarette butts
litter
broken glass
telephone
smell of rubbish
yellow lines
drain
graffiti
lampost
cobbles
stone wall
napkin
window
manhole cover
overhanging shrubs
green door
letter box
railings
fence panels
steps
man drinking
mound
sunshine
shadows
pedestrian zone
red telephone box
scaffolding
exhausts
litter bin
bus stop
taxi rank
colours
pinks, reds, blacks
flags
souvenirs
eating

and so on…

On returning the studio, I wrote up all 631 words on a long piece of paper stuck on the wall

What I was struck by, was how they reminded me of the names carved into the walls of the Menin Gate; column after column of words which at first meant nothing, but all of which had their own unique reference. I decided to create a virtual wall of these words which gave them a very different quality:

I had thought of writing all the words as in the extract above, in a prose form, i.e. something like: “a man wears a luminous jacket, another pulls a suitcase. There’s a machine for maps and the market is on. Bicycles are propped against the wall. Nearby is a litter bin…” Adding words however makes it less authentic, and writing them in this style at the time would be far too time consuming. What is interesting however, is how the mind knits the single words together and in a way the prose form is that process – the mind fills in the blanks.

luminous jacket
suitcase
maps
market
bicycles
litter bin
becomes…

“a man wears a luminous jacket, another pulls a suitcase. There’s a machine for maps and the market is on. Bicycles are propped against the wall. Nearby is a litter bin…”
I refer to a previous entry, Reading and Experience in which I quote the following extract from Filip Muller’s, ‘Eyewitness Auschwitz – Three Years in the Gas Chambers.’

“There was utter silence, broken only by the twitterings of the swallows darting back and forth.”

As I wrote: we were not there in Auschwitz at the moment this line describes (the moment before the doomed prisoner speaks up against the camp’s brutal regime), yet we all know silence and have seen and heard swallows. So although we were not there to witness at first hand this terrible event, we can imagine a silence, a particular one we might have felt some place before, and picture a time we saw a swallow fly. We can use fragments of evidence (photographs, documentary footage) to construct a fuller picture, and fill in the gaps with fragments of own experience. When we speak the words of others therefore, those words will form pictures in our own minds drawn from our own experience.
Taking the list above and adding words to turn it into prose, is in a way similar to this filling in the gaps. In this respect, it is worth doing.

I also tried to draw memories of the walk, taking individual words and drawing the corresponding image. It has always interested me, exactly what we see when we remember something. If we could print out a memory, what would it look like? Certainly what we remember is an approximation of what we actually saw, and again, we use words to ‘join the dots’, to fill in the gaps.
I am reminded again of what I read on Memory places:

“It is better to form one’s memory loci in a deserted and solitary place, for crowds of passing people tend to weaken the impression. Therefore the student intent on acquiring a sharp and well defined set of loci will choose one unfrequented building in which to memorise places…”

The image this passage conjures is of a deserted building, one which has seen better days and is perhaps in need of restoration, a shell which needs some gaps filled.

Day 5

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A good day’s work today. I added graphite powder to the deckchairs and having done one I realised I’d have to rethink how I was going to display them; the graphite had given the canvas of the deckchair a metallic look, making it appear like the remnant of a battlefield which I liked very much. I’ve always thought that an empty chair is never completely empty, that it somehow contains the presence of a person, and with all three painted, they also collectively took on the appearance of the dead and wounded of the Front.

I’m now thinking of getting three more after my girlfriend considered them – when they were white (as above) – to be like the white gravestones of a military cemetery. I think the contrast between the two sets would be very interesting. There is also something of a shadow about the graphite deckchairs, which ties in nicely with what I wrote yesterday. These shadows are collapsing to the ground, recumbent; dead.

Shadows 1

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I’ve lately been reading ‘A Short History of the Shadow’ by Victor I. Stoichita which begins by explaining how the art of painting and sculpture first came into being (at least in the minds of men like Pliny and Athenagoras, before the cave painters of Lascaux, for example, were discovered) through the tracing of shadows. In his Natural History (xxxv, 43) Pliny says:

“Enough and more than enough has now been said about painting. It may be suitable to append to these remarks something about the plastic art. It was through the service of that same earth that modelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by the lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the rest of his pottery; and it is said that this likeness was preserved in the Shrine of the Nymphs…”

Athenagoras recounts the same story as follows:

“The manufacture of dolls was inspired by a young woman: very much enamoured of a man, she drew his shadow on the wall as he slept; then her father, charmed by the extraordinary likeness – he worked with clay – sculpted the image by filling the contours with earth.”

As Stoichita writes: “What is fairly apparent from both texts is that the primary purpose of basing a representation on the shadow was possibly that of turning it into a mnemonic aid; of making the absent become present. In this case the shadow’s resemblance (similitudo) to the original plays a crucial role… The constantly changing real shadow of the beloved man will escort him on his travels, while the image of his shadow, captured on the wall, will remain a memento opposed to the movement of the journey and will therefore have a propitiatory value. The real shadow accompanies the one who is leaving, while his outline, captured once and for all on the wall immortalizes a presence in the form of an image, captures an instant and makes it last.”

The verticalizing of the shadow – the projection of it onto a wall – and its likeness to the person from whom its being projected are both, according to Stoichita, “vital functions of this surrogate image… The lapidary details pertaining to the mechanism of verticalization are extremely important, since Pliny would certainly have been aware – as more than one passage from his work indicates – of a whole early metaphysics on the shadow (particularly on the shadow recumbent on the earth) and of its links with death. On close examination the text reveals its hidden meaning: on the eve of her beloved’s departure, Butades’ daughter ‘captured’, so to speak, the image of her lover in a verticality meant to last forever. Thus she exorcised the threat of death, and his image – making up for his absence – kept him forever upright, i.e. ‘alive’.”

Returning for a moment to the story of the lovers, Stoichita argues that this story appears incomplete, “Pliny has eliminated an important episode located somewhere between the young woman creating the silhouette and the final likeness being installed in the temple. This episode, without which the meaning of the extract is greatly diminished, is the death of the beloved.” Stoichita goes on to suggest that the story should actually read as follows:

1) The girl crates a surrogate image, which has a dual purpose: it must remind her of the face of the lover who is leaving (to go to war) and must exorcise the danger he is in.
2) The young man dies (probably heroically, probably on the battlefield).
3) (Because the beloved dies) the father creates a semblance whose function is to duplicate the one who has disappeared. This double has a ‘soul’ (in the form of a shadow) and a ‘body’ (in the form of the receptacle of this soul).
4) The clay semblance becomes a cult object in the temple at Corinth.

This semblance made by the girl’s father becomes therefore a funereal figure, an object “which ensures the young warrior – who, in the prime of life, falls on the battlefield – everlasting glory by immortalizing what he was in the eyes of subsequent generations: his name, his exploits, his career, the heroic end that establishes him once and for all as a man of excellence, one of the noble dead.”

I found this version of the story particularly interesting, as it ties in with the work I’ve been doing on World War I, during which of course millions of men left loved their ones, never to return. One can imagine each of their shadows drawn in outlines on wall right across the world, merging to become a single amorphous shadow blanketing the ground.

Stoichita also makes an interesting distinction between shadows cast in the day and at night. “Once the image is captured on the wall, time stands still… a shadow in sunlight denotes a moment in time and no more than that, but a nocturnal shadow is removed from the natural order of time, it halts the flow of progress.”

Postcard 1906

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This morning I received a postcard which I’d purchased on eBay; an early twentieth century hand-tinted photograph of Magdalen Tower postmarked on the reverse Oxford 1906.

The text on the rear of the postcard reads as follows:

“My Dear Boy I am sorry that I will not manage to see you on my visit to Coombe. I go to Wallingford on the 13. Will visit when I get settled then you must come over, much love and blessing, your loving brother…”

It’s amazing as one reads this card, to think that it was posted over 100 years ago. Combe (the version written on the postcard – Combe – is actually a misspelling) is a village near Woodstock and a place where my Mum and Step-Dad once lived, and as I read it, I’m reminded of their cottage and the many memories associated with it. Secondly, at the end, the author signs off as ‘your loving brother’ and so, as I read the words in my own voice, I’m reminded of my own brother. In a text of just a few lines written 101 years ago, I have an image – or rather images – of my own family and a house from my own past. I imagine too the bond between the two brothers as being the same which exists between me and mine and as such I have an interest in their lives – lives which have almost certainly been over for several decades. Yet, although the author of this card is certainly dead, by reading his words, we somehow give him life, albeit for the time it takes to read the message. And in some ways, this message might be likened to the last words of a man killed in war, whose last letter reaches his loved ones after news of his death had already been received.

The fact the postcard features an image of Magdalen Tower, serves to strengthen this feeling of familiarity. The man who wrote the postcard, and his brother who received it, no doubt knew it well, just as I do now. It becomes – as indeed does the postcard as an object in its own right – a memory space, a “‘starting point’, and a place for the ‘purpose of recollecting'”. Reading these words, I am sharing the ‘space ‘ of the postcard as an object, as well as a recollection of the scene it shows, Magdalen Tower.

In his book, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes says regarding photographs:

“From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze – light though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”

This quote precisely describes a memory space. “‘From a real body [the author of the postcard], which [who] was there [in 1906], proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here [in 2007]; the duration of the transmission [101 years] is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being [the author] as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing [or the author of the postcard] to my gaze – light though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin [a memory space] I share with anyone who has been photographed [or seen the thing I’m seeing].”

Day 4

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Finally finished priming the deckchairs and coated them with a layer of white oil paint. I will definitely display them as they appear in the photo below, i.e. flat on the ground (not white) as this gives them each the look of a tomb stone, such as one might find in the floor of a church.

I’ve also decided on a title: ‘The smell of an English Summer (fresh cut grass) 1916’. This relates directly to the extract from Neil Hanson’s book, ‘The Unknown Soldier,’ which I quoted in the previous entry ‘Reading and Experience.’

Reading and Experience

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“Decayed sandbags, new sandbags, boards, dropped ammunition, empty tins, corrugated iron…”

These words are those of a German soldier – written at the Front just before the Battle of the Somme – and form just a small part of an extract in Neil Hanson’s book, ‘The Unknown Soldier.’ Instantly I read them, they called to mind the remnants dredged from the battlefield which I’d seen in the museum at Hill 62 in Ieper.

On their own, these artefacts are powerful – yet mute – witnesses to the Great War, but when reading a soldier write about them, even listing them as above, they change. They each regain their voice – their signifier, and re-emerge from the shadows.

In my painting ‘Auschwitz-Birkenau Remembered‘ I cut words up into individual letters and scattered them onto the painting, I also wrote directly into the paint itself to show how words failed to articulate the horror of such a place (the written words could barely be read). Another way of looking at this however, is to say that words are able to speak of such horror, but have simply lost their original voice. It then falls to us to speak the words for those who are no longer able to do so, to put them back together.

Subsequent to this, I’ve been thinking about the process of reading, for example an extract from Filip Muller’s powerful testimony, ‘Eyewitness Auschwitz – Three Years in the Gas Chambers,’ in which he describes the horrific murder of a fellow prisoner.

“There was utter silence, broken only by the twitterings of the swallows darting back and forth.”

We were not there in Auschwitz at the moment this line describes (the moment before the doomed prisoner speaks up against the camp’s brutal regime), yet we all know silence and have seen and heard swallows. So although we were not there to witness at first hand this terrible event, we can imagine a silence, a particular one we might have felt some place before, and picture a time we saw a swallow fly. We can use fragments of evidence (photographs, documentary footage) to construct a fuller picture, and fill in the gaps with fragments of own experience. When we speak the words of others therefore, those words will form pictures in our own minds drawn from our own experience.

“As the torrents of machine-gun bullets ripped through the grassy slopes up which the British troops were advancing, the smell of an English summer – fresh cut grass – filled the air. For thousands it would be the last scent they would ever smell.”

This extract, also from Neil Hanson’s book, ‘The Unknown Soldier,’ presents us with an image of slaughter, made all the more terrible (if that were possible) with a reference to the smell of cut grass – one of those smells which invokes in most of us, memories of lazy summer’s days. The two are, obviously, utterly incongruous, yet it somehow makes our task of imagining the horror a little easier. We know the smell of cut grass, and waves of associations and memories are no doubt triggered by the aroma. In the days before the battle, when the soldiers doomed to die waited for the day, they too might have smelled the grassy air and found their way back to times when things were better. It is again the contrast – something which I’ve described before in relation to my visits to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ieper which makes this passage so heart-breaking.

Finally, I wrote earlier (Imagination and Memory) of how as a child I created a world, made up of fragments of landscapes which I loved, and how as I grew older, I created worlds that were ‘real’ – visions of Oxford as it might have looked centuries earlier. Just as when reading the quote above, I would – as I still do – use documentary evidence to start – images (photographs and drawings) of how the city looked, contemporary writings (such as those of Anthony Wood) – and then fill in the gaps using my own direct experience, in effect, the city as it looks today.

The Unknown Soldier

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Extract from Neil Hanson’s book, ‘The Unknown Soldier,’ concerning the infamous Battle of the Somme.

‘The next day, the regiment began the long march to the Front. In the heat of early summer, nature had made attempts to reclaim the violated ground and a deceptive air of somnolence lay on the landscape. “The fields over which the scythe has not passed for years are a mass of wild flowers. They bathe the trenches in a hot stream of scent,” “smelling to heaven like incense in the sun.” “Brimstone butterflies and chalk-blues flutter above the dugouts and settle on the green ooze of the shell holes.” “Then a bare field strewn with barbed wire, rusted to a sort of Titian red – out of which a hare came just now and sat up with fear in his eyes and the sun shining red through his ears. Then the trench… piled earth with groundsel and great flaming dandelions and chickweed and pimpernels running riot over it. Decayed sandbags, new sandbags, boards, dropped ammunition, empty tins, corrugated iron, a smell of boots and stagnant water and burnt powder and oil and men, the occasional bang of a rifle and the click of a bolt, the occasional crack of a bullet coming over, or the wailing diminuendo of a ricochet. And over everything, the larks… and on the other side, nothing but a mud wall, with a few dandelions against the sky, until you look over the top or through a periscope and then you see the barbed wire and more barbed wire, and then fields with larks in them, and then barbed wire again.”

As the torrents of machine-gun bullets ripped through the grassy slopes up which the British troops were advancing, the smell of an English summer – fresh cut grass – filled the air. For thousands it would be the last scent they would ever smell.’

Imagination and Memory

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Like many others, my imagination has played a central role in my life ever since I was a young boy, and recently, in connection with my recent work, I’ve been thinking about that role and how it has changed as I’ve grown up. As a child, I lived much of my life within imagined worlds; fictional countries which I would map and for which I would create entire histories. I would inhabit these places, hidden from everyone else, and while I walked, I would be walking not in the real world, but in my mind. I can still to this day remember one particular map in all its detail; the mountain ranges, the plains, the forests which were always a particular favourite of mine. I can even list the names of the towns and cities (Aquidos, Anasrehlon, Varimeere), yet while this ‘place’ has remained unchanged, whilst my imagination as a place is only a little different (one might say that the country I created was a map of my mind) the uses made of my imagination have altered. As a child I imagined the imagined, as an adult I imagine reality, and often the unimaginable.

Going back to my childhood, my imagination provided me with a means of escape (not that I needed to escape anywhere – I was fortunate enough to have the perfect upbringing). I’d always wanted to see the world unspoilt, an Arcadian vision without cars, planes, pollution, machines or any trace of the modern. And in a sense, this is I believe, what first fired my interest in the past. As a child and well into my teens – and perhaps early twenties – my interest in history ended at the late 17th century, certainly well before the Industrial Revolution, when the modern world began to develop and my vision of a rural Arcadia began to collapse. In some ways, my imagined world was a pick of the best bits of the (somewhat idealised) past; the ancient sprawling forests, beautiful timber-framed houses. When I looked at an old pair of 16th century shoes, a bottle from a 17th century tavern, I was picturing their place in a comparatively unspoiled landscape.

Of course, as a child, my impressions of the past were, as I said, somewhat idealised; they were little more than romantic impressions of an untamed idyll. In reality of course, the past, at least on a human level was, I came to understand, far from romantic; life was short, harsh and often brutal. So as I grew older, and while I still used my imagination to find my way back into the past, I didn’t imagine the imagined, but rather, as I said earlier, the unimaginable: the reality of the lives of others.

In recent years, this change in emphasis has seen the boundaries of my interest in history widen to include the twentieth century; in particular the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust and the slaughter of World War One. Yet although these very difficult subjects are far removed from the invented landscapes of my childhood, my memories of maps and the stories created within them, provide an interesting, and I believe vital counterpoint to my understanding of such subjects. One of the problems with studying the Holocaust (and indeed World War One) is not only the sheer scale of the suffering, but also the fact that often the victims of both are, in the eyes of history, just that: victims. To say otherwise, i.e. to say that they weren’t only victims, is not to take away from the terrible suffering they endured, but rather to emphasise it, to focus our minds; they weren’t only victims, they were people with lives both behind them and ahead of them; pasts that for many were happy. They all had childhoods, and perhaps imagined their own fantasy worlds. Many, caught up in the Holocaust, were still inhabiting them – they were still of course, children.

As I’ve said, as a child, I would walk and imagine myself in my invented landscape, but as I grew older, although I still walked and imagined myself elsewhere, it wasn’t within an invented world that I walked, but rather a real world; that of my home town, Oxford’s past. Of course one might argue that this past was a much a fabrication as the map I drew as a child, but nevertheless, it was constructed from fragments of the past – drawings, paintings, descriptions in books, photographs. I could never know for sure what things looked like, or how it must have been to walk through the city’s streets (for example during the 14th century) but my imagination did its best to conjure a picture. Of course, as well as those things listed above, there are parts of the city which are contemporary with the past and these buildings and streets are particularly important when looking for that which has long since gone; just as I have found in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ieper.

One man who did so much to capture Oxford before much of its past was demolished in the late 18th century was a German artist and musician called John Malchair. His drawings are amongst the most beautiful and indeed haunting images of a city I have seen, particularly his views of Friar Bacon’s study, an unusual edifice which was sadly demolished in 1779.

One particularly poignant drawing (below) shows the remaining arch, when all above it has been taken down.

In my mind, as I walk, I suppose one might say I am often trying to rebuild Friar Bacon’s Study. Walking as a means of remembering then is important to me although it does throw up interesting philosophical questions (which I’ve touched on before) namely, what is it we are remembering when we ‘remember’ events which we ourselves have not experienced. As Paul Ricoeur asks in his book, ‘Memory, History, Forgetting,’ ‘Of what are there memories? Whose memory is it?’.

The invented world I ‘walked in’ as a child was a fiction, an amalgam of all the fragments of an unspoiled landscape which I could see in parts around me. And, in a sense, when ‘remembering’ the past of Malchair’s Oxford, the Great War and the Holocaust, I am creating a fiction of sorts – a world created from fragments; photographs, drawings, letters and documentary evidence. The past becomes my imaginary world.

So what is it which separates the past and my past imaginary landscapes? It is this: it is the theme of this residency; Residue.

Day 3

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Spent much of the day – in fact all day – priming the three deckchairs which I’ve now almost finished; just one more coat on the canvas should be enough.


I like the positioning of these, although I will stick to my original idea of having them fixed to the wall. Maybe I need to buy three more so that I can play around with the idea of placement a bit more.

I also bought a 25 metre roll of white cartridge paper on which to do some drawings based on memory, just as I did with Auschwitz-Birkenau. I’m thinking of doing something based on a ‘tour’ of Oxford, somehow using the measurements of John Gwynn’s survey. With such a large space to work in, it seems a shame not to use the full length of the wall in some way.

Day 2

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With the help of my brother, I managed to get some of my stuff down to OVADA and began to prime the three red deckchairs. By the end of the day, I’d managed to get most of the frames done but the canvas itself is quite cheap, and the gesso not so easily applied. It maybe that I have to buy some proper canvas and use that instead but I shall see how I get on tomorrow.

As well as working inside the studio, I wandered around the market in Gloucester Green and took a few photos.

And some when the market began to close…

I also recorded around 10 minutes of sound; the shouts of the vendors, fragments of conversations etc.

MP3 of market sounds

Walking and Measuring

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A few years ago, I did some research into the 1771 Mileways Act which saw a range of ‘improvements’ made to Oxford; improvements which, unfortunately, resulted in the demolition of some of the city’s more interesting mediaeval buildings; the North and East gates, the Bocardo Gaol and Friar Bacon’s study on Folly Bridge. The streets were also repaved, and to pay for this, each resident paid according to the yardage of their property. John Gwynn, an architect who designed the Covered Market and the new Magdalen Bridge, therefore undertook a survey, in which all the frontages of all properties on the city’s streets were measured. Seeing him with his measure, residents at the time thought the worse – that he was measuring up properties so that they would be demolished; given the spate of demolitions at the time it was perhaps hardly surprising. I’ve since imagined Gwynn therefore as some kind of undertaker, measuring up the city for its doom, and image which fits nicely with my work on Broken Hayes.

The list of measurements is very interesting as it presents us with a window onto a world which has now almost disappeared; certainly those who inhabited the town (Mrs. Barret of Magpie Lane, Mr. Hedges of Broken Hayes, Mr. Badger of Fish Street) have all gone and left only their names and the size of their ghostly dwellings. But the layout of the streets (if not the buildings and their inhabitants) still remain, and so, by walking these streets, armed with a residual list of measurements, one can walk back in time and make a connection with this vanished population.

This correlation between time and distance had initially come through my thinking of how difficult it often is, to identify with people who live abroad in war-zones (Iraq and Afghanistan for example), for, even though these countries are only a comparatively short distance away, they might as well be years in the past, for it’s almost as difficult to relate to those who live (and die) there, as it is to those who lived and died, for example, during the first and second world wars, or the time of John Gwynn.

Day 1

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I’ve always thought there something about this place (Gloucester Green) which separates it from the rest of the city. Despite the extensive redevelopment carried out in the 1980s, it still retains something of that place which Anthony Wood described in the 17th century as ‘rude, broken and undigested.’ I’m not sure what it is exactly, but I was surprised, as I walked around, at just how empty it was. I have to say, I doubt as to whether there’ll be much of a contrast – in terms of numbers of people – between Gloucester Green at night and during the day. However, tomorrow is market day, and so perhaps with the the extra numbers, I might find some kind of contrast there.

Words

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Emptiness
Trauma
Silence
Contrast
Memory
Solitariness
Residue
Postcards
Deckchairs
Forgetting
Objects
Home
Journeys
Walking
Measurements
Space
Past

Two Minutes Silence

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Every year, at the 11th hour, on the 11th day of the 11th month, we pause for two minutes and remember all those who died in two world wars and subsequent conflicts. We stand still and in silence, a tradition which, one hopes, will always be respected. Over the last few days, having written about the nature of silence in those places which have witnessed appalling human suffering, I’ve been thinking more about this tradition of silence – not so as to question it (as I’ve said, it is a tradition which must always be recognised and respected) but rather its process; what we think about when we stop and are quiet; what it is we are doing when we remember?

The silence temporarily turns the street, the office or wherever it is we’re standing into a different place; it creates a contrast, against which we might compare our normal everyday environment – that from which we step for two minutes to then rejoin at its end. This act of rejoining is, I believe, as important as the stopping and the silence, for as simple as it is, it’s nevertheless something which millions were unable to do, whether through disability or simply because they never came home at all.

© Nicholas Hedges 2024