Art, Writing and Research
Following on from the completion of my text map (which I’m thinking of as a map of an individual rather than a place) I remembered this photograph which I bought in a junk shop, which seems, visually, to capture the idea of the texts. The photograph (below) dates from the 1920s.
One can imagine what someone doing the same thing as me might have written had they walked through this scene:
A woman walks quickly over the road
Two men chat on the pavement
A cyclist passes
‘Hovis Teas’
Parked cars
Having read Tim Ingold’s book ‘Lines – a Brief History‘, I downloaded another of his books entitled ‘Being Alive, Essays in Movement, Knowledge and Description‘ as the title seemed to suggest it would be of interest to me insofar as my work on empathy and the past has found itself returning time and again to ideas of movement and knowledge; empathy is, I believe, an augmented discourse between bodily experience and knowledge, and my aim as an artist is to articulate empathy through the description of this conversation between individuals and the landscape.
“It is by moving that we know, and it is by moving, too, that we describe,” writes Ingold early on in the book, which seems to bode well for my research and my search for the form that on an artistic level my research should take .
I’ve recently been working with the form of the folded map, inspired as I’ve written before by an old trench map which I recently purchased. In particular, I’m interested in the folds of the map, the creases which show that the map was used and in the possession of an individual. In ‘Lines – a Brief History‘ Ingold draws a parallel between creases in materials such as paper and the creases one finds on the palm of your hand which reinforces the connection between owner and object.
I’ve been wondering how I can develop this idea. I’ve already completed a ‘text map’ based on observations made over the course of several walks (below) but I want to develop the idea graphically as well.
I thought about the concept of a map and what the aesthetic of the folded paper alludes to. I came up with the following:
What I want to do is articulate the idea of empathy as a discourse between bodily experience and knowledge. The text map above is a document of bodily experience which when written down and presented as a ‘map’ becomes knowledge which other individuals could theoretically use. Its shape and its folds allude both to the idea of place and of possession (the concept of an individual as a place is something else which I’ve been exploring over the past few years). But what about the circular nature of experience and knowledge?
The fact is, when we think about the past, we can only ever build a picture through tiny fragments – whether pieces of pot, miscellaneous artefacts like coins, pieces of text, letters and anecdotes (unfolding through enfolding). Each of the phrases on my text map is a fragment from which the wider picture can be extrapolated, just as with a fragment of pot, one not only builds an image of the pot but extrapolates the wide world to which it once belonged.
The piece of pottery has something in common with the phrase: “leaves drowned in disappearing puddles”which I noted on one of my walks. It is also interesting that when I found the above piece of pottery, I also discovered – almost at the same time – a leaf, which was almost identical in colour. The transient nowness of the leaf then, serves – through its colour – to articulate the idea of the fragment of pot as being similar to the fragment of text.
Taken from World War I studio portraits.
On the bus into work this morning I read the following in Robert Macfarlane’s ‘The Wild Places.’
“Woods and forests have been essential to the imagination of these islands, and of countries throughout the world, for centuries. It is for this reason that when woods are felled, when they are suppressed by tarmac and concrete and asphalt, it is not only unique species and habitats that disappear, but also unique memories, unique forms of thought. Woods, like other wild places, can kindle new ways of being or cognition in people, can urge their minds differently.”
Woods have always been places of intense interest to me, particularly as a boy when I would love to imagine England as being covered in ancient woodland. My interest in history wasnt so much an interest in the characters and machinations of past times, but a means of accessing the landscape of those times – a way into the woods.
I would create maps of imagined places, all of which would be home to vast swathes of untouched and unspoiled forests. And while those maps were ‘of places’, they were much more a means into a place, a path into and through my imagination.
In the same book ‘The Wild Places,’ Macfarlane briefly discusses the poet, composer and songwriter Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) who like the poet Edward Thomas, loved to explore the countryside of his native county – Gloucestershire. In 1915, Gurney enlisted to fight in the Great War, and in the battlefields of the Ypres Salient, discovered what Macfarlane describes as an ‘anti-landscape,’ a place in which the only evidence of forests ‘were upright bare dead trunks, stripped of leaves, branches and bark by shrapnel and gunfire.’ As Macfarlane writes: ‘On the military maps of the area that Gurney used, some of the old names of the landscape remained. But many of the new names spoke of the avoidance of death, or of its arrival. Shrapnel Corner, Crump Farm, Hellfire Corner, Halfway House, Dead Dog Farm, Battle Wood, Sanctuary Wood. The woods were no longer there, however; these were ghost names only. The trees had been felled for revetting, or blasted from the earth by shells.’
As someone with an interest in maps and in trench maps, the above passage interested me, particularly as I’ve often thought about how the landscape of the First World war, replete with all its new names and new features, had been superimposed, or rather gouged out of the landsape, only to smoothed over with the passage of time. Its was a sudden landscape. A few scars, smoothed over with grass – or hidden by trees – are all that’s left, but the wounds are still weeping in its names – not so much those of soldiers inscribed on the thousands of headstones, but rather the names of places – Arras, The Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele.
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| Trench Map (1915) |
In many places the woods have returned, and while the landscape today bears little resemblance to that of the war – in which ‘the rich and complicated pasts of the trees that Gurney cherished’ had been so utterly effaced, it is nonetheless within those woods that one’s imagination picks up the voices of the past – of the fallen; voices which spoke in the midst of battle, of places and people cherished back home.
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| Woods in The Somme |
After returning from the war, Ivor Gurney, like so many others suffered a breakdown (he’d suffered his first in 1913) and a passage in Macfarlane’s book, which describes the visits to Gurney – within the Dartford asylum – by Helen Thomas, the widow of Edward Thomas is particularly moving. Helen took with her one of her husband’s Ordnance survey maps of Gloucestershire:
‘She recalled afterwards that Gurney, on being shown the map, took it at once from her, and spread it out on his bed, in his hot little white-tiled room in the asylum, with the sunlight falling in patterns upon the floor. Then the two of them kneeled together by the bed and traced out, with their fingers, walks that they and Edward had taken in the past.’
The map they laid on the bed was one that showed the familiar trails and paths of the countryside. But it was also one which, like that I made in my childhood, gave Gurney access to his imagination – to his own past. Together, the patient and his visitor read it with their fingers, following the trails as one follows words on a page. A narrative of sorts was revealed, memories stitched together by the threads of roads, paths and trails.
Today, on a walk around Oxford, I completed my first text map which I began in Ampney Crucis about a month ago. Below is both the map and an image of the walks as recorded on my GPS (and then ‘arranged’ in Photoshop).
I’ve almost completed my map of observations made during a number of walks over the past few weeks and am now looking to see how I can progress this line of work.
The paper shown above has started to soften, from being carried for so long in my pocket and being held in my hand as I walk. It’s started to feel almost like material. I like the way too that it’s acquired those tell-take signs of wear and tear; dog-eared corners, rips and holes and creases.
On the reverse, you can see the selotape used to keep it all together, indeed there is something about this side which I really like.
I like the idea of these pieces becoming maps of individuals rather than just a place, while at the same time representing people as places – or at least the product of places. I like the idea of them becoming patterns, such as clothing patterns, again giving a sense of the individual.
Another part of this process has been the recording of my walks using GPS. I have, for this work, been putting them all together in one image.
In our minds, when we think about our own past journeys, there is little sense of space, i.e. the physical space between the places in which we made those journeys. Everything is heaped together. Time, like physical space is also similarly compressed. All the walks I’ve made for this work therefore are heaped one on top of the other, with little regard to their geography or temporality. The past with which I seek to identify is also like this. Geography and time are compressed. Everything is fragmentary.
In any given place – for example, Oxford – we can, as we walk down an ancient road, follow the (fragmentary) course of a life lived centuries ago. But walking down another road, we turn and pick up the fragment of another life. And so on and so on.
It is this fragmentary nature of past time, and its compression of time and space, which makes it sometimes hard of for us to empathise with anonymous individuals who lived in the distant past. To make sense of the fragments, we need to see them in the context of the present – in the nowness of the present. By doing this, we can begin to unpick these matted strands of time and space.
History is the attempt to make sense of the fragments left behind by time – to construct a narrative of events with a beginning and an end. It has a point A and a point B, between which the narrative weaves a path, much like a script, novel or score. What I’m interested in however are those fragments, not as parts of a narrative progression, but as fragments of a moment in time – a moment which was once now. As I’ve written before:
Access to the past therefore comes… through the careful observation of a part in which the whole can be observed. As Henri Bortoft writes in The Wholeness of Nature – Goethe’s Way of Seeing; ‘…thus the whole emerges simultaneously with the accumulation of the parts, not because it is the sum of the parts, but because it is immanent within them’.
Consider the span of an hour, and imagine a city over the course of that hour with everything that would happen throughout that period of time; history with its refined narrative thread, is rather like a line – a route – drawn through a map of that place. The line delineates space (in that it starts then ends elsewhere) but we know nothing of what happens around it – the mundane, everyday things which make the present – now – what it is. In my walks I capture moments, observations of mundane things happening around me as I walk.
For example:
A man talks holding his hat
A flag flies, fluttering in the growing wind
The next bus is due
A car beeps
Amber, red, the signal beeps
The brakes hiss on a bus
One could argue that these observations still represent a linear sequence rather than being fragments of a single moment in time. However, reading them, one does get a sense of the nowness of the past. The route as drawn by the GPS represents the narrative thread (history) whereas the text represents the individual moments from which the narrative is constructed.
Imagine if someone had done the same in 1897 at the time of last Diamond Jubilee.
© Oxfordshire County Council
We get a sense of the nowness of a past time from images such as that above, but as Roland Bathes states, time in photographs is engorged. It doesn’t move. With the work I’ve made above however, the immediacy of a past time is captured, but, unlike photographs, is fluid. And it is this fluidity which is crucial to an empathetic engagement with the past. For the nowness of the present isn’t static, but rather flows within us and around us.
The following text from Robert Macfarlane’s ‘The Wild Places,’ interested me a great deal in light of what I’ve written:
“Much of what we know of the life of the monks of Enlli and places like it, is inferred from the rich literature which they left behind. Their poems speak eloquently of a passionate and precise relationship with nature, and of the blend of receptivity and detachment which characterised their interactions with it. Some of the poems read like jotted lists, or field-notes: ‘Swarms of bees, beetles, soft music of the world, a gentle humming; brent geese, barnacle geese, shortly before All Hallows, music of the dark wild torrent.'”
I worked again tonight on the studies for Heavy Water Sleep, working in landscape elements such as trees and sky. The original text from which the words are taken, ‘Pilgrims of the Wild’ by Grey Owl, is set chiefly in the forests of Canada. And in the ‘secondary text’ which inspired the work in the first place, ‘The Diaries of Adam Czerniakow’ there is a moving passage in which, following a visit outside the Warsaw Ghetto to the woods of Otwock, he writes simply, ‘… the air, the woods, breathing.’ Trees then seem integral to the work and have indeed been a recurring them in much of my work, particularly work to do with the Holocaust and World War I.
I wanted then to use trees in these works and found myself using a stylised form which I’d scribbled one day in my notebook based on lines you find in Family Tree diagrams.
This symbolic tree was in part inspired by some work I did on the First World War in which I used the dividing lines on the backs of original wartime postcards to symbolise the bond between the anonymous individuals who died in the war and their families back at home. These ‘T’ shaped divides reminded me of photographs in which hastily dug graves were marked on battlefields with crude crucifixes. I therefore created landscapes (based on my visits to battlefield sites on what had been the Front) and used these T-shapes to represent graves.
From these T-shapes I derived the forms for the trees below.
The link between them and the Ts above is an obvious one – even more so when one considers the original inspiration for this work.
I worked again last night on the ‘Heavy Water Sleep’ paintings, continuing to concentrate on the texture. For the first board below I used a white acrylic paint mixed with an acrylic modelling paste.
The words are too chaotic in this one and the paint has dried very matt. I could add some gloss medium but it would make much more sense to use oil paint which I will for the final versions. I will add another layer to the painting above later.
Having completed this painting I worked again on the one I did yesterday.
I like how the words are slightly more obscured now and much prefer their more ordered placement. The next thing I want to try is keeping the lines of the pages together rather than placing them in a random fashion.
I’ve started work on a new series of paintings based on the Heavy Water Sleep work I’ve been doing over the past few years. The idea is to create a series of paintings based on the idea of the words being a trail in a landscape (in turn derived from the idea that the book is a kind of map, leading me through the landscape of the past). The words from each page will be cut out with most painted over either wholly or in part. The words which make up the ‘poem’ of each page will be left, as per the image below.
The above sketch shows how the words might be placed.
What I realised after completing this sketch is how important it is to create a sense of depth in the work. At the moment the words are raised upon the surface, whereas they need to appear ‘sunk’ into the paint layer like footprints in the snow. Furthermore, the picture plane needs to be much bigger to give a greater sense of space – of wilderness; after all, this work represents the idea of the past as a place.
I shall continue – fo the time being – working on this scale in order to get the textures right, then progress to a larger canvas.
I suppose the ‘feeling’ I want to achieve with these paintings is that of the lone traveller, following in the footsteps of someone long since gone, and the one landscape painter who comes to mind is Caspar David Friedrich, two of whose pictures are reproduced below:
Of course I’m not aspiring to create something that looks like these paintings, but something which instills within the viewer the same sense of space, solitude and wilderness – not forgetting a sense of time’s inevitable passing.
For some time I have been searching for what one might describe as a unifying aesthetic; a process for creating a work with an aesthetic appearance which serves not only to appeal visually, but which also conveys meaning.
There are numerous things which appeal to me aesthetically such as (in no particular order); palimpsests (sheets of paper or parchment where words are erased but never completely and over which new text is added, to then be erased and so on), notebooks (such as those belonging to Walter Benjamin), patched up papers, maps (like old trench maps), lines (like scratches on surfaces or pencil marks), poster sites (where the posters have been pasted one on top of the other and ripped), drips and splashes of paint, blurs, text in paintings (particularly pencil), stains, things faded, fragments, old writing and so on.
Some examples of what I mean:
My work is about time, life, death and memory. It is concerned with empathy and in particular empathy as an ever expanding dialogue between bodily experience and knowledge. But what form should my work take to encompass all these things?
It was whilst in Edinburgh with my fiancee, that I began to find that form. It started with an exhibition of work by Tony Swain, who uses text as a source for his work, not so much in terms of the words, but in the substance on which they’re printed; in his case, newspapers. What I liked about his work in particular was its organic quality, the fact that it could be expanded, new sheets added to create large landscapes such as that below.
Then whilst visiting St. Giles church in Edinburgh, I saw the National Covenant on display; a 17th century document which I found – aesthetically speaking – quite beautiful. Comprising a large sheet of parchment, one could see the folds and also patches of parchment which had been added to the main sheet. The different sizes of writing also appealed, just as they do in notebooks – such as those of Walter Benjamin.
A version of the covenant can be seen below:
When I bought a World War I trench map a few months ago, I did some observation work on it and wrote the following regarding the way it had been folded:
“It doesn’t resist being folded again. First vertically and then horizontally.
I unfold it and instinctively flatten it down. The folds in places rise up. The fold which runs vertically through the red lines does especially. This part of the map won’t remain flat unless I press it down with my hand. As I do, my head instinctively lifts a little and my eyes move along the lines of red to rest around the village of Thiepval.
These actions would no doubt have been repeated in the past when the map was perhaps more pristine – when the folds were sharper and the map lay flat.
The map, when I lift it up, seems to want to fold into a particular shape. It doesn’t want to be put away, but rather be folded so that two columns remain in view. The folds which delineate this part are a darker brown than all the others. In this section of the map is a concentration of red lines and blue lines.
The way it folds suggests that this was what was most important. When I pick up the map to fold it completely, it folds so that the ‘front’ and ‘reverse’ are tucked away. The front now is one of the segments or ‘squares’ containing French words (Sondage) and their English equivalents (Boring – as in cut).
The past movements associated with this map are therefore recorded in its folds. It resists being folded any other way.”
The last line is particularly important. Empathy is an emotion felt with the body, requiring an embodied imagination to articulate the dialogue between bodily experience and knowledge. The folds in the map enable me to record the sense of past movement in a two dimensional space. And creating a kind of map allows me to explore the past in terms of its being a place. When I was a child, history was very much a way into a place, a world of woods and forests untouched by the mechanised age. Text was therefore a precursor to what would eventually emerge as an image and the two would often combine on the maps I created.
Creating some kind of map is what I want to do, but a map which evolves, that’s organic, which changes continuously.
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| Fossilised shell, around 195 millions years old |
“As physicists have pointed out, it is no accident that we see stars in our sky, for stars are a necessary part of any universe capable of generating us. Again, this does not imply that stars exist in order to make us. It is just that without stars there would be no atoms heavier than lithium in the periodic table, and a chemistry of only three elements is too impoverished to support life. Seeing is the kind of activity that can go on only in the kind of universe where what you see is stars.”
Richard Dawkins
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| Mediaeval pottery shard |
“Only God knows the reason for those changes linked with the mystery of the future: for men there are truths hidden in the depths of time; they come forth only with the help of the ages, just as there are stars so far removed from the earth that their light has not yet reached us.”
Chateaubriand
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| Photograph of World War I serviceman |
“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.”
Roland Barthes
A second example of wholeness involves the ordinary experience of looking up at the sky at night and seeing the vast number of stars. We see this nighttime world by means of the light ‘carrying’ the stars to us, which means that this vast expanse of sky must all be present in the light which passes through the small hole of the pupil into the eye. Furthermore, other observers in different locations can see the same expanse of night sky.
Henri Bortoft
As physicists have pointed out, it is no accident that we see stars in our sky, for stars are a necessary part of any universe capable of generating us. Again, this does not imply that stars exist in order to make us. It is just that without stars there would be no atoms heavier than lithium in the periodic table, and a chemistry of only three elements is too impoverished to support life. Seeing is the kind of activity that can go on only in the kind of universe where what you see is stars.
Richard Dawkins
The light of the moon covers the earth, yet it can be contained in a single bowl of water.
Dogen Zenji (1200-1253)
Only God knows the reason for those changes linked with the mystery of the future : for men there are truths hidden in the depths of time; they come forth only with the help of the ages, just as there are stars so far removed from the earth that their light has not yet reached us.
Chateaubriand
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.
Roland Barthes
I discovered this fossilised seashell, whilst hunting for fossils on the beach at Charmouth. The beach is part of the Jurassic Coast in Dorset – a UNESCO World Heritage site – and is famous for the fossils which one can find there.
This shell, this familiar pattern of lines, is around 195 million years old. It was extant in this form throughout the time of the dinosaurs. It ‘witnessed’ their demise and the emergence of man millions of years later. It has ‘seen’ man evolve from the earliest ancestors to the first modern homo-sapiens.
On the way down to Dorset, we stopped off at Stonehenge and marvelled at the stones whose exact purpose still remains a mystery. What I find most incredible is their age, somewhere in the region of 4,500 years old. To think what has happened in the intervening years is incredible, yet its age pales into insignificance when one considers that the small piece of shell-shaped rock above is over 40,000 times its age.
But in discovering the fossil, I found myself beginning to contrast the moment I broke open the rock to reveal it, with all the moments that have filled the 195,000,000 years since the shell fell to the sea floor. Moments when dinosaurs walked the Earth; moments when the world changed shape to make the countries and continents with which we are familiar. Moments when the dinosaurs became extinct, when mankind emerged to become what we are today; when the ice age came and passed… etc.
Less a Goethean observation and a more general observation with reference to the Goethean method (click here to read more about Goethean Observation).
Note: The aim of this observation is not to write a beautiful prose account of the map, but rather to look, observe and find a hook upon which to hang the next piece of research into this subject.
The map has been printed on a large sheet of paper creased vertically and horizontally with lines where the map has been folded and opened. The paper itself is a brownish-white, darker along the lines of the folds and around the edges in places. The corners on the left hand side are a little dog-eared.
The map on one side shows the area concerned – a part of France as the map tells me at the top. This side of the paper is smooth to the touch, but on the reverse I can feel a tooth. Folding over the first fold, I can see the tooth on the ‘reverse’ very clearly. The [fabric of the] paper is made up of very straight vertical lines, with wonkier lines running horizontally. There are four ‘squares’ (actually rectangles) to each folded column and eight folded columns (7 creases) in all. There are four folded rows (3 creases).
The ‘square’ at the top of the first vertical fold on the reverse side of the map tells me this is a ‘Trench Map’. Like the bottom square, the colour of the paper is much darker than the rest. The two squares in between are like the colour of the map on the reverse side – possibly even lighter. This shows how the map, when folded, has a front and a reverse side. Having turned over the map so that this first fold appears on the right I can see all 32 ‘squares’ that make up the map. The folds are particularly prominent, some darker than others. Some of the squares show no sign – or at least – very little sign of wear. There are some splits in some of the folds – caused of course by the repeated action of opening and closing the map.
Six ‘squares’ along the top two are covered with words – French words and their English translations. The words are the names of landscape features such as tree (arbre), gate/stile (barrière), oak tree (chêne) and pond (etang). The rest of the squares, including one on this top row are blank. All one can see is the pattern of the paper’s fabric.
Turning the map over, one is aware of the holes and the sound the paper makes. It reminds me of a soft version of the crackle of a fire.
The drawing of the landscape takes up much of this side of the paper with explanatory texts and a key beneath as well as to the right of the map.
Looking at the details of the map, one can see the various features of the landscape – the woods, roads, hills (through contour lines), rivers, ponds or lakes and of course various towns and villages. All these features, along with the names and the grid are printed in a ‘black’ ink which actually appears as a light ‘browny’ grey.
What one’s eye is drawn to straight away however are the patches of colour on the right hand side of the map; blue and red. The colours have been used to colour a multitude of lines which run from the top of the page to the bottom. The majority of these are red. There is one dashed blue line which snakes from top to bottom to the left of the furthest-most red line and to the left of that, the same colour has been used to mark out the landscape features showing rivers, lakes and what appears to be marshy land.
The red lines themselves have been drawn in a sort of ‘stepped’ way and cover a quarter of the map up to the right hand side. Looking closely at these lines, one is made aware of the other lines of the map – black curved lines, straight vertical and horizontal lines; straight vertical and horizontal dotted lines – these lines divide each square (delineated by the other straight lines) into four quarters.
In each of the large squares there are numbers, the greatest of which appears to be 36. Among some of these numbers, there are also letters – P, Q, R, V, W, X.
As I look at the map I begin to notice the mix of French and English words/names. The place names are clearly French; La Boiselle, Thiepval, Authuille, Contelmaison, Beaumont-Hamel. In amongst these however are names like Tara Hill, The Crucifix, Railway Copse, Brickworks, Pond Bridge and Cemetery. There also appear to be instructions: ‘35 to 40 ft deep: Impractical for Cavalry.’ There is also a largish hole above Pozières.
Folding the paper up, it fits entirely in my hand. It is like a concertina, about an inch thick without too much pressure applied.
Looking more closely at the front of the folded map, I can see the words:
Trench Map
France
Sheet 57D S.E.
Edition 2.D.
There is then a diagram – an ‘index to adjoining sheets’ beneath which are the words and numerals:
Scale: 1/20,000
On the left hand side of this ‘face’ are what appear to be two initials, DM. The map smells of its age, a musty smell of something that for a long time was forgotten.
On the diagram I can see a small square which has been shaded in to distinguish it from all the others. One can see that this piece of paper is part of a much larger map measuring ‘eight maps’ wide and ‘eight maps’ high.
The map is clearly old. The date 1916 has been printed on the ‘map’ side, but even without this, the style of the printing and the condition tells me it’s of some age. Through its age it has expanded in its folded form. The folds aren’t as crisp as they were. It has no doubt lain forgotten in an attic or some such place, acquiring its patina and its smell. As the dust has grown, the text has faded, although the edges of each letter are crisp. And still I can see the ‘DM’ in pencil on the left hand side.
It doesn’t resist being folded again. First vertically and then horizontally.
I unfold it and instinctively flatten it down. The folds in places rise up. The fold which runs vertically through the red lines does especially. This part of the map won’t remain flat unless I press it down with my hand. As I do, my head instinctively lifts a little and my eyes move along the lines of red to rest around the village of Thiepval.
These actions would no doubt have been repeated in the past when the map was perhaps more pristine – when the folds were sharper and the map lay flat.
The map, when I lift it up, seems to want to fold into a particular shape. It doesn’t want to be put away, but rather be folded so that two columns remain in view. The folds which delineate this part are a darker brown than all the others. In this section of the map is a concentration of red lines and blue lines.
The way it folds suggests that this was what was most important. When I pick up the map to fold it completely, it folds so that the ‘front’ and ‘reverse’ are tucked away. The front now is one of the segments or ‘squares’ containing French words (Sondage) and their English equivalents (Boring – as in cut).
The past movements associated with this map are therefore recorded in its folds. It resists being folded any other way.
We know the map was made in 1916 with minor corrections to details on 15.8.16. This is just six weeks after the first offensive in the Battle of the Somme. Shortly after this period the map would have been replaced with another as the landscape changed with each offensive.
When I look at this map from the comfort of my own front room I see history – albeit one written in a less conventional way. It still has words and pictures.
For much of its life it was no doubt a curiosity. Maybe it was a reminder for those that were there who when looking at the lines would have seen something very different – not on the map but in their minds.
Those who used the map would have seen something else. By August 1916, the colossal tragedy of the first day of the Somme would have been etched on everyone’s mind. The contour lines can hardly tell the reality of the ground’s undulations, and yet it was these which meant the difference between life and death. The map serves to distance us from reality.
Considering its past, the action of being folded and then unfolded over and over, one can almost imagine a bellows lifting and then depressing, letting out air like a breath – a last gasp.
The map is like a palimpsest, albeit one which is just a single print. One can see the original landscape which over the years changed as landscape features assumed English monikers. It is a place that appears at once to be real and imagined – a non sort of place.
‘The Poodles’, ‘The Dingle’, ‘Willow Patch’, ‘Round Wood’, ‘Birch Tree Wood’, – they all have the sound of something made up – a children’s story. ‘Middle Wood’, ‘Villa Wood’, ‘Lonely Copse’. There is even marked ‘a row of apple trees’. These names – these alien names – all appear on the right hand side of the map; on the left, large swathes of woodland go unnamed.
The same is true of road names.
Observation of certain parts of the map has changed the way it moves – these movements seem impressed into the map’s fabric.
When I stand to look at the map, I stand as, no doubt, others stood around it. I can again imagine the creases as sharper, the colour of the paper whiter, the lines more vivid.
Looking at the map, unfolding it and folding it, smoothing down the paper, one gets the sense of an individual. 1/20,000. The map as an object tells me about the individual who looked at it. What is pictured tells me – when I think of the scale – about the thousands of men killed on that first day of the Somme.
One gets the sense of other maps printed before this one, upon which this one is based – each one covering over the horror of the most recent losses of life. They become like shrouds.
Each one would have been used to plan the next map, and the next, and so on, until there weren’t any red lines left.
The image below is the last in a series I’ve made using both an original World War One postcard and a photograph I took in Verdun. All are works in progress.
I’ve been fascinated with the backdrops in some of these postcards for quite some time now and have been looking at ways of using them in works relating to the Great War and, in particular, the issue of empathy.
The original postcard is of course in black and white (with a greenish tint) and shows a soldier about to head to the Front, standing, leaning on a chair.
Behind him is an idealised image – an idyllic, invented landscape, a far cry from what he was, perhaps, about to encounter, but close in some respects to what we find on battlefields today; where there were trenches, arms, barbed wire and bodies, there are now trees. And amidst the trees, incongruous concrete Pill Boxes stand and watch as the seasons come and go. Everything is slowly reclaimed. The trees in the image at the top of the blog spill to reclaim the past – the interior of the studio – through the gap left by the missing soldier.
I have placed the solider back beyond the gap left by the vague shape of his own body, to remind us that people like the soldiers we see in all these postcards, were once like those of us who have visited the battlefields. They too would have known what it was to stand in a wood. To listen to the wind blowing through the branches.
To stand and do just that, is one way to remember them.
