Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Trench Panoramas

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There is something aesthetically beautiful about photographs taken of the Western Front during World War One. It might sound a strange thing to say, but it’s not unlike the view I have of those photographs taken by the Czechoslovak Secret Police in Prague. Although taken in very different circumstances, they are nonetheless about observation – secret observation of a perceived or definite enemy.

The photograph below is one of those panoramas, taken in Serre during the First World War. (I do not have permission to reproduce the image so have shown it below in no great detail.)

The fact I find these images so aesthetically pleasing is perhaps a reminder of the distance between myself and the subject. These images, it goes without saying, were not taken for their aesthetic appeal. These were images designed to better enable armies to deliver death to the enemy.

I wanted somehow to use this look in creating panormas of fake landscapes based on places to which I’ve been and the work I’ve made as part of my Mine the Mountain series, in particular, The Past is a Foreign Country which is shown below.

Alongside this work, I will, at the next Mine the Mountain exhibition, show a series of landscape photographs taken on trips around Europe, such as the two below.

I wanted to show that although the past as we perceive it is in some respects a fiction (in that it can only be imagined) it was nonetheless real – that what happened did so in what was then the present. Taking the aesthetic of the panorama above therefore, I’ve created an amalgma of the landscapes, making a single panorama. It’s not a finished piece by any means, but the start of a new line of work.

Postcard From Corfe Castle – 1978

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The Past is Time without a ticking clock. A place whose paths and roads are measured in years. The Present is where the clock ticks but always only for a second; where, upon those same paths and roads we continue, for that second, with our existence.

My first encounter with history, as far as I can recall, came when I was 7 years old. During a family holiday in Dorset, we visited Corfe Castle, a picture-postcard ruin which towers over the small village of Corfe below. I have two particular memories of that visit. The first is of a postcard which, in my mind’s eye I can still recall quite vividly and which I’ve since found for sale on the web (and purchased).

Corfe Castle 1978

Most of its design comprises text commemorating the assassination of Edward the Martyr (reigned 975-978) a millennium before. There are two dates at the top (978-1978) and I can remember clearly looking at the year 978 and trying to conceive of a date which didn’t begin with a ‘1’.

The very idea of a 1000 years ago fuelled my imagination; the very fact the place in which I was standing witnessed such an event a 1000 years before I was even born set in motion a chain of thought which has remained to this day. Even though I was only 7, I remember considering my own non-existence, albeit in ways a 7 year old might imagine such a thing. Three years before in 1975, my great-grandmother (born in 1878) became the first person I knew to die. It was shortly after her death, that the very idea of death began to trouble me and in some ways I think the thought of a 1000 years ago presented itself to me as death in reverse. Again, this way of thinking about the past has remained with me ever since, which might go some way to explaining why I tend to visit places synonymous with trauma and death.

It was in the small museum in Corfe Village that I remember staring at a cannonball fired during the English Civil War. I can recall trying to see it as it was hundreds of years before I was born. This wasn’t just an object sitting on display; it had once been handled by people, it had flown through the air and had played a part in the castle’s destruction. I wasn’t just looking at the cannonball, I was trying to imagine its flight.

 So in this postcard and the castle at Corfe my passion for history began, and this short text is the opening paragraph of a very long story which I’ve been reading ever since.

A Well Staring at the Sky

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The title of this piece takes its name from a passage in Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet;

“We never know self-realization. We are two abysses – a well staring at the sky.”

For me, this quote describes the act of looking at a photograph, at people in the past who are likely no longer with us. I look at them from a time when they do not exist, and they look at me from a time when my existence was wholly unlikely. They are reflections left in the water of the well, and I, for the moment am the person looking in. The portraits in the work are from a single photograph taken in Vienna c.1938. The faces are mixed with images cropped from an aerial view of the Bełżec Death Camp photographed in 1944. History too is a well staring at the sky. Again in the well’s water, we see the sky reflected with some of its stars and all of its gaps. But no gap is truly empty and all the holes in what we call history are full of traces; the residue of a glance perhaps shared between two people.

To see more work from this exhibition, please follow this link.

© Nicholas Hedges 2024