Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

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    • Artwork (Random)
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        • Murder
        • The Woods, Breathing
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        • The Trees
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        • St. Giles Fair 1908
        • Cornmarket 1907
        • Headington Hill 1903
        • Queen Street 1897
        • Snow (details)
        • The Wall
      • Stitched Work
        • ‘Missded’ Tokens
        • ‘Missded’ 1 – Tokens
        • ‘Missded’ 2 – Tokens
        • ‘Missded’ 3 – Tokens
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        • Remembered Visit to Birkenau
        • Somewhere Between Writing and Trees
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        • T (Crosses)
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      • The Leaves Are Singing Still
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    • A Line Drawn in Water
    • A Line Drawn in Water (Blog)
    • Mine the Mountain 3
    • Mine the Mountain 2
    • The Woods, Breathing
    • Snow
    • Echo
    • Murder
    • The Tourist
    • Dreamcatcher
    • Mine the Mountain
    • M8
    • Umbilical Light
    • The Gate
    • Creatures
    • Residue
    • A visit to Auschwitz
  • Family History
  • Me

The Tourist

Through being a tourist in places such as Auschwitz, Bełżec and Majdanek, as well as the battlefield sites of Ypres and Verdun, I have become a tourist in the past, the lives of others, and ultimately myself.

After my visit to Auschwitz, I wanted to turn numbers into people, to find the individuals amongst the 1.1 million largely anonymous dead. And although of course I could never know them by name, I thought I might discover what it really means to be human, to have had a life as well as a death. Too often we see the victims of these places as having always been that – victims; millions of people, whose individuality was erased through genocide and war and who are remembered only as products of the terrible places in which they met their deaths.

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Looking at myself, at what it means that I (that we) exist at all, I have become a tourist in my own life, going on a journey through which I’ve explored the lives and landscapes of my ancestors; anonymous people lost to the past, one of whom, my great-great uncle Jonah Rogers, was killed in Ypres in 1915.

I’ve found myself walking in unfamiliar places; environments which would have been familiar to those of my ancestors who lived there; landscapes which have been as instrumental in my coming-into-being as my ancestors themselves. These places might not be familiar to me but in some strange way, I am familiar to them.

So while this journey has led me into my past and the world of my ancestors, it is within that world, that landscape, that I can find my way back to Auschwitz, Bełżec and Majdanek; to the battlefields of World War One. And although I can never know what it was like to be there, I can begin to understand, through discovering my own past, at least a little more, the lives of those otherwise anonymous people who died there.

© Nicholas Hedges 2024

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