Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Proposing Moments of Pastoral

by

Through my research on World War I, I’ve accumulated a large amount of data – postcards, quotes, maps, texts, photographs, personal thoughts and experiences – which I want to start distilling into a new body of work. To do that, I’ve been looking for a ‘lens’ through which I might look again at this archive and thus begin shaping my research into something I can use in a work.

Quotes

A lens could be anything; an image, an experience, a thought, or in this case a quote – or quotes. I’ve discussed them before, but here they are again, the first from Neil Hanson, the second, Paul Fussell:

“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.”

“…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.”

The smell of an English summer – fresh cut grass – and the idea of moments of pastoral come together to make a lens through which I can re-examine my research. I’ve used Neil Hanson’s quote before, as the title of a piece in 2007 (pictured below), but combined with Paul Fussell’s quote it becomes even more interesting.

The Smell of an English Summer 1916 (Fresh Cut Grass)

The smell of fresh cut grass is a smell I often associate with the past, in particular, my childhood, and as a child, my notion of the past was a pastoral one. To me, the past was an unspoilt place, where squirrels could run the length of the country without touching the ground (a ‘fact’ I always loved). I loved the idea – and I still do – of untouched swathes of forest.

The past was always pastoral.

Maps

To pursue my pastoral fantasy, I would create maps of imagined landscapes (something I’ve also discussed numerous times before) and this too has become a lens through which to look at my research. When we think of those who fought in World War I, we often consider only their deaths. We don’t imagine their lives beforehand, especially the fact that not so long before the war, many were still children.

My maps were well-wooded.

As are the trench maps I have in my collection.

Postcards and gardens

There is a link therefore between a pastoral past, my childhood and the consideration of those who died in World War I as children years before – as real people who existed beyond the theatre of war.

This leads me to postcards, such as the one below:

World War 1 Serviceman

This postcard shows a soldier posing with his mother(?) standing in what might have been his garden, in the place where, perhaps, he grew up as a child. I might not be able to empathise with him as a soldier directly, but I can well imagine his garden. Part of the landscape of my childhood comprises the gardens of my home and those of my grandparents, as well as parks and playing fields at school. They are pastoral landscapes in miniature, where the grass was cut on a summer’s day.

Proposing moments of pastoral

The question which I haven’t asked is: how do you propose moments of pastoral? The answer to this, I think, is crucial to the development of any work.

To propose is to suggest, invite. It is something given to another.

Maps are objects which propose. But what are they proposing? On the one hand, they propose journeys. More often than not, we use them to plan a journey in the future, for example a day trip or holiday. They require us to use our imaginations; to imagine the future, the landscape and our position within in. They can however propose journeys into the past. In a previous blog about Ivor Gurney, I wrote:

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.

Maps can also be used of course to orient ourselves in the present. We might consult them to find out where we are or where we ought to go. In fact, they can be used to orient ourselves in the past, present and future.

As an artist wishing to propose moments of pastoral, I want to use the form of the map as a starting point. The map might show a pastoral scene, using, for example, the ‘vocabulary’ of the trench map to show the trees.

The Past in Pastoral

by

July 1st 2016 will mark the 100th anniversary of the infamous Somme offensive. Having already made a lot of work about World War I, I want to mark this anniversary with some new pieces, working around the theme of ‘shared moments of pastoral’.

There have been numerous starting points which, in no particular order, I will outline below.

“…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.” Paul Fussell

“Here in the back garden of the trenches it is amazingly beautiful – the mud is dried to a pinky colour and upon the parapet, and through sandbags even, the green grass pushes up and waves in the breeze, while clots of bright dandelions, clover, thistles and twenty other plants flourish luxuriantly, brilliant growths of bright green against the pink earth. Nearly all the better trees have come out, and the birds sing all day in spite of shells and shrapnel…” Paul Nash

‘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.’ Neil Hanson 

“There was utter silence, broken only by the twitterings of the swallows darting back and forth.” Filip Muller on the murder of a friend in Auschwitz

World War 1 Serviceman
WW1 Backdrops

Trench Map 1916
My Invented World - Ehvfandar

Lamenting Trees

by

‘Ghastly by day, ghostly by night, the rottenest place on the Somme’. Such was how soldiers described High Wood, one of the many that peppered the battlefields of Flanders and France. Woods in name only, these once dense places were quickly reduced to matchwood. One officer, writing of Sanctuary Wood near Ypres, declared that: ‘Dante in his wildest imaginings never conceived the like.’

We, in our wildest imaginations can not conceive the like. So how can we remember and empathise with those who for whom it was real? Historian Paul Fussell provides a starting point:

“…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.”

I aim therefore to create a series of pastoral landscapes and accompanying maps which use, as their starting point, portrait postcards of Great War soldiers (in particular, elements found on the studio backdrops against which they were photographed) and Trench maps. Although the pastoral scenes will be empty – devoid of human life – I aim nonetheless to create a sense that people have been there; that the landscape is remembering them – an absence rather than a lack. This will serve to articulate the journeys of those soldiers, from photographic studio to the Front, and for many, death.

Two quotes are useful here; the first from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies:

“Look, trees exist.
The houses we live in continue to stand. Only we
pass away like air traded for air and everything
conspires to maintain silence about us, perhaps
half out of shame, half out of unspeakable hope.”

The other from Wordsworth’s Guide to the District of the Lakes:

“…we can only imagine ‘the primeval woods shedding and renewing their leaves with no human eye to notice or human heart to regret or welcome the change.'”

In Rilke’s poem, the idea of trees (among other things) remembering through their silence those who’ve passed amongst them is particularly appealing and finds a kind of reversed echo in Wordworth’s imaginings of the primeval woods: where it isn’t the human heart regretting or welcoming the change, rather the trees, regretting (or welcoming) our absence.

Words from war poet Edward Thomas serve to further this idea of ‘remembering trees’. In the Rose Acre Papers, a collection of essays published in 1904 he writes:

“…a bleak day in February, when the trees moan as if they cover a tomb, the tomb of the voices, the thrones and dominations, of summer past.”

His widow, Helen, writing after the war in ‘World Without End,’  described how the “snow still lay deep under the forest trees, which tortured by the merciless wind moaned and swayed as if in exhausted agony.’

It’s almost the same lamenting her husband had described before the war.

Richard Hayman, writing in ‘Trees – Woodlands and Western Civilization’ states that “woods are poised between reality and imagination…” As a child woods were, for me, a means of accessing both my imagination and the distant past; a place “for chance encounters” with historical figures, monsters and knights. Woods, as Hayman puts it, are places which can “take protagonists from their everyday lives” while, as I would add, keeping them grounded in the reality of the present.

As a child I would often create maps of imagined landscapes covered – like my imagined mediaeval world – by vast swathes of forest. And as an adult, the act of drawing them returns me to a place where my childhood and the distant past coexist; “a mixture of personal memory and cultivated myth” grounded in the nowness of the present. As such, the ‘pastoral’ landscapes I’m going to paint, based on those strange and incongruous studio backdrops, become too, landscapes of childish sylvan fancies.

When considering the war, much of our attention is, naturally, focused through the lens of its duration: the years 1914-1918. But every one of those men who fought in the trenches was once a child, and since becoming a father this has become an important aspect of my ability to empathise. To empathise, we must see these men unencumbered by the hindsight which history affords us; as men who lived lives before 1914 and beyond the theatre of war. I return to Paul Fussell’s quote (“…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral”) and add that we must also see the soldiers who fought not as men, but as children. Again, the words of Edward Thomas serve to articulate this idea; the “summer past” including perhaps those lost years of childhood. Neil Hanson, writing in ‘The Unknown Soldier’  talks of how, on the eve of the Battle of the Somme, the smell in the air was that of an English summer – of fresh cut grass; the smell – one could say – of memories; of childhood.

Returning to Rilke’s Duino Elegies we find another dimension to these landscapes.

And gently she guides him through the vast
Keening landscape, shows him temple columns,
ruins of castles from which the Keening princes
Once wisely governed the land. She shows him
the towering trees of tears, the fields of melancholy
in bloom (the living know this only in gentle leaf).

These pastoral landscapes become therefore, not only the landscapes of childhood imaginings, of “personal memory and cultivated myth”, but the landscape of mourning. The words of Edward and Helen Thomas are especially poignant in this regard; Edward’s trees mourn for a long-lost past; Helen’s for an empty future.

Glimmerings: The War Poets, Paths and Folds

by

One of the nicest compliments I received during Friday’s private view was ‘…these remind me of Siegfried Sassoon…’. The works in question were those images of imagined World War I landscapes painted onto folded paper, one of which I have shown below:

DSC07879

In fact, the war poets were brought up a number of times in relation to these works which – for obvious reasons – pleased me enormously. But, I wondered what it was about these pieces which called to mind the poets?

One of the poets I’ve become increasingly interested in, is Edward Thomas – killed at the battle of Arras in 1917. I first became aware of his work whilst reading a book of World War I poetry, in which I found his poem ‘Roads’ (a poem I’ve already discussed in relation to my work). It was then in Robert Macfarlane’s book ‘Wild Places’ that I encountered Thomas again, this time in relation to another poet, Ivor Gurney. In a previous blog I wrote:

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.’

 Macfarlane discusses Thomas in another book, ‘The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot,’ in which he writes how for Thomas, paths “connected real places but… also led outwards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inwards to the self. These traverses – between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal – occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. He imagined himself in topographical terms. Corners, junctions, stiles, fingerposts, forks, crossroads, trivia, beckoning over-the-hill paths, tracks that led to danger, death or bliss: he internalized the features of path-filled landscapes such that they gave form to his melancholy and his hopes. Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings: he not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.”

DSC07578

Ever since I walked a path in Wales on which I knew my great-great grandfather walked every day to the mine in which he worked, I’ve been interested in the idea of people as place (and vice-versa) – see Landscape DNA – the simultaneity of stories so far. The path from the small town of Hafodyrynys to Llanhilleth where he worked, not only connected those two places, it also connected me with my ancestor. It did just what Thomas suggested; connected real places but also went backwards to the past and inwards to my own self. As Macfarlane puts it: “paths run through people as surely as they run through places.”

 It was important for me that the images shown above did not appear so much as pictures – objects stuck on a wall – as objects of use. I wanted them to appear as if they’d been unfolded rather than simply painted, that like maps, they could be read rather than simply looked at. I wanted them to retain the potential for being folded (which, if they were framed, wouldn’t have been possible) for this inherent potential of folding and unfolding refers back to an observation I made whilst studying an old trench map.

DSC07754

During that observation I wrote, “…the past movements associated with this map are therefore recorded in its folds. It resists being folded any other way.”

The folds in the map are like ancient paths in a landscape. We can walk (within reason) wherever we like through a place, but more often than not, we will follow the way of countless others before us. Paths are themselves like folds within the landscape, and we, like the map, resist being folded any other way.

Trench Map 1916

Macfarlane again writes how for Thomas “…map-reading approached mysticism: he described it as an ‘old power’, of which only a few people had the ‘glimmerings’.”

These glimmerings reminded me of a passage I read in Merlin Coverley’s book Psychogeography, in which he writes: “Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary…”

These ‘glimmerings’or ‘shifting angles’ are best seen or accessed through the everyday; observations of which I record in other map works.

Map Work

This is something which Macfarlane again seems to allude to in ‘The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot’, when he writes: “The journeys told here take their bearings from the distant past, but also from the debris and phenomena of the present, for this is often a double insistence of old landscapes: that they be read in the then but felt in the now. The waymarkers of my walks were not only dolmens, tumuli and long barrows, but also last year’s ash-leaf frails (brittle in the hand), last night’s fox scat (rank in the nose), this minute’s bird call (sharp in the ear), the pylon’s lyric crackle and the crop-sprayer’s hiss.”

As I have recorded in my text-maps:

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

Maps are objects which we fold and unfold. We unfold them to find our place within the landscape. We fold them and carry them with us. The process or unfolding and (en)folding: the idea that the past can be seen as being enfolded within the smallest objects and everyday observations in vital to my work; as is the way in which we are enfolded (written) into the landscape as we walk; the way in which the landscape is unfolded as we travel across it. Knowledge, likewise, is also unfolded in this way. As Tim Ingold writes in ‘Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description’:

“…knowledge is perpetually ‘under construction… the things of this world are their stories, identified not by fixed attributes but by their paths of movement in an unfolding [my italics] field of relations. Each is the focus of ongoing activity. Thus in the storied world… things do not exist, they occur. Where things meet, occurrences intertwine, as each becomes bound up in the other’s story. Every such binding is a place or topic. It is in this binding that knowledge is generated.”

Empathy is another important aspect of my work and I’ve stated before that empathy is an augmented discourse between bodily experience and knowledge. I like to think that with these works I’ve discovered a means of expressing that.

Finally, the works I’ve made are fragile pieces, and in another passage on Thomas, I found in Macfarlane’s prose a sentence which describes why they should be so: “His poems are thronged with ghosts, dark doubles, and deep forests in which paths peter out; his landscapes are often brittle surfaces, prone to sudden collapse.”

Perhaps this, in part, answers my question above.

Movement, Knowledge and Description

by

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:

  • the idea of a specific place or of place in general
  • the sense of that place – through the map object – as belonging to an individual
  • the idea of the individual
  • the idea of movement in and through a place whether in the past, present or future
  • the idea of movement preserved in the folds

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.

Bartlemas Chapel Excavation

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.

Maps and Ivory Gurney

by

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. 

Trench Map 1916
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.

The Somme
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.

Goethean Observation: World War I Trench Map

by

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.

Trench Map 1916

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.

Trench Map 1916

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.

Trench Map 1916

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.

Trench Map 1916

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.

Projections

by

Having completed my last stitching project based on trench maps from World War I, I decided to try and superimpose some postcard portraits onto them, of soldiers headed for the Front. In the first (below) I used the photograph of a family which I ‘projected’ onto the map as shown hanging on a washing line.


What strikes me about this image as a whole, is the contrast between now and then as it exists in the contrast between the black and white of the photograph and the colour of the day. This colour, and the sense of the nowness of the present, helps strengthen my own empathetic feelings towards those long since lost – and all but forgotten – to history.

The fact the map hangs on a line like an item of washing, also reinforces the sense of domesticity which is a theme running through some of the postcard portraits, many of which were taken in the backyards of soldiers (or their parents), where evidence of the everydayness of domestic life is in abundance.

One such photograph shows a young couple who’ve recently been married. They stand, unsure of what the future brings, both wearing a look full of apprehension, staring into the lens of the camera, as if this ‘clock for seeing’ as Barthes once referred to them, really could show them the future.

The image onto which their portrait has been projected shows the reverse side of the map, where the threads used to stitch the past together hang like the cut threads of countless lives.

Serre Palimpsest (completed)

by

I’ve just completed – after several weeks of stitching – a piece of work called ‘Serre Palimpsest’ the creation of which I’ve been documenting on my blog. It became apparent soon after I started this work that this was a piece with two sides which may seem an obvious thing to say, but it seemed to me that the two sides we’re saying different things, just as things below the surface say something different to those above, whilst as the same time remaining connected.

The two images below show the completed work. The first, the front:

Serre Palimpsest

The second, the reverse:

Serre Palimpsest

The lines stitched in black show the roads before the war (the modern day road system is pretty much the same), the blue stitching and red show the British and German trenches respectively – with No Man’s Land between, and the green stitching shows the modern day field boundaries.

What was interesting about creating the work was how the threads from the reverse of the piece would emerge into the front, mirroring the way pieces of the past (bits of old shell etc.) find their way to the surface after many years below the ground. The cut lines on the reverse made me think of the paths soldiers would have taken to get there; paths which in many cases were cut in the Somme.

Serre Palimpsest

Serre Palimpsest

Occasionally, the threads would be tied together on the reverse which again made me think of how our lives today are similar to those who died in that their lives were lived lives too; of course their circumstances couldn’t have been more different, but the fact is that the vast statistics of the Somme comprise real individuals.

To take the photographs I hung the piece on the washing line. The weather was unseasonably hot and sunny, much like the weather would have been on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1st July 1916). As I looked as the work swaying gently in the breeze, I thought about the photographs taken in the back gardens of those who were about to set off for the Front. I was reminded too of the backdrops used in studio-based photographs.

Serre Palimpsest

World War 1 Serviceman

World War 1 Serviceman

Stitched Trench Map – Patterns

by

Three patterns will be used for this piece of work: 1) a map of the pre-war road system around Serre, France; 2) a map of the First World War trench system around the same area, and 3) a map of the area’s modern day field boundaries.

A single piece of fabric will be cut, firstly according to the pattern of roads.

3maps-roads

This same piece will then be re-cut according to the pattern of trenches.

3maps-trenches

And finally, this will be cut a third time according to modern day field boundaries.

3maps-fields

The final stitched piece of fabric might then look something like this:

3maps-roads-trenches-fields

Looking at the images reminded me of star constellations, and so I inverted two of the images to see how they looked.

3maps-roads-inv

3maps-fields-inv

See Serre Palimpsest.

Stitched Trench Maps II

by

I completed my first three stitched ‘trench maps’ today and have popped them in frames ready to be exhibited in Luxembourg. Ideally they wouldn’t be in frames at all and would be presented on a much large scale, but as first versions go I’m pleased. Certainly I can see how I would like to progress them, adding more layers to create kinds of palimpsests.

X, III

by

Whilst looking at some more Trench Maps of the area in which my great-great-uncle was killed, I was reminded of an idea I had for some paintings which I had made notes on in my sketchbook. The image below is taken from my notebook and shows a quick sketch of an aerial view of the area with hundreds of Xs marking places where men fell and lay undiscovered. It follows on from some work I did for my Mine the Mountain exhibition in October 2008.


The next image is taken from a trench map dated to March 1918.

There is no legend as to what these Xs mean, but given what I wrote in my notebook, I couldn’t help but see them as anonymous graves. The word ‘secret’ at the top of the map enhanced that idea.

Maps

by

As a child I spent many hours drawing maps of imaginary lands to which in my mind I would often escape. Over time these worlds – and one in particular (see image below) – became a very real part of my existence; I knew its towns, forests, plains and mountains; I knew the seas by which it was surrounded, the lakes and rivers and potted histories of each location. I created characters and can still to this day remember them along with the geography of the world they inhabited.

My Invented World - Ehvfandar

As well as being a means of navigating my imagination, the maps were also guides to the real world. Whilst out walking, I would just as likely find myself walking in my fictional landscape and as such parallels between the real and the imagined were established. To some extent these parallels still exist but it wasn’t until I started researching trench maps of the area in which my great-great-uncle Jonah Rogers was killed (near Ypres) that I was again reminded of my fictional world.

I was interested in pinpointing the place in which Jonah Rogers was killed; to see what the terrain was like and thereby understand, at least in part, something of the world he would have known. One can often imagine that the trenches were more or less just rudimentary ditches cut into the ground in which soliders lived as best they could, just a matter of yards away from the enemy, and of course, in many respects that’s precisley what they were; but the trench system was actually very complex. Far from being two lines gouged into the ground, the trenches of the opposing armies were labyrinthine as the image below reveals.

This map shows an area just outside Ypres. One can see precisely how complex the system of trenches were and yet of course the map can only tell us so much. Sanctuary Wood (shown on the left of the detail above) was described in the diary of one officer as follows:

“Of the terrible and horrible scenes I have seen in the war, Sanctuary Wood is the worst… Sanctuary Wood in 1914 was a sanctuary, but today, Dante in his wildest imaginings never conceived a like.”

It’s hard to imagine Dante’s image of hell as being in any way less horrific than anything on earth, particularly when looking at the map above.

What one can also see on another part of this map are some of the names which soldiers gave to the trenches and the areas in which they were fighting. Often names that were difficult to pronnounce were changed so that, for example, Ploegsteert became Plug Street. However, in some cases, areas were given names that made sense in terms of their being familiar names from home.

On this image one can clearly see a place called Clapham Junction. Of course there was no Clapham Junction in Belgium before the war, but by naming unfamiliar (and often utterly destroyed areas) with familiar names, soldiers and officers could, one assumes, navigate areas more easily, whether physically or in terms of reconaissance and planning. To plan attacks on places which have become muddied wastelands (to put it mildly) with few features remaining (the woods on the maps, shown as collections of lollypop trees were of course little more than burned splinters) one would need names, just as one would need names for the complex network of trenches. Could it be that by naming places with names from home, such reduced and barren landscapes (the ‘topography of Golgotha’ as Wilfred Owen called the Western Front) would appear as belonging in some way to the soldiers who fought there – was it a way of inspiring them?

The closest map – in terms of date – I could find relating to my great-great-uncle’s war, was one of St. Julien which dates from July 1915, just two months after his death in the Second Battle of Ypres. I’d wanted to get an idea of the trench system he would have been known at first hand and as I looked at the trenches shown (only German trenches were shown on this map) I found a road named after my home town; Oxford Road. Ironically, alongside this road was a cottage (one must assume there was little left of it at the time) which had been dubbed Monmouth Cottage – my great-great-uncle was from Monmouthshire.

I couldn’t help but think there was something in this naming of unfamiliar places with more familiar names which paralleled thoughts I’d had as regards my family heritage and in particular how researching it has helped me relate more easily to the past.

History is of course full of gaps. If we try and picture a place as it appeared at a given date we have to use our imaginations to fill in the holes where, for example, buildings have been razed. If we read reports or stories about events in the past we have to use our imaginations to understand the moment as fully as possible, to understand how the average person responded at the time. In doing so, we project a part of ourselves onto the past, something which is of course familiar (see ‘From Dinosaurs to Human Beings,’ OVADA Residency Blog, 2007).

Like my childhood maps of invented places, my family tree is in many ways a map of a fictional landscape, or rather a route through it. That is not to say of course that my family’s past is itself a fiction, but rather that history, in terms of how we see it in our minds is. History is in many ways a wasteland having been obliterated by time and yet there are parts of its landscape which still remain standing despite the tumult. Extant buildings, contemporaneous documents all act as pointers to a disappeared world, a world which also hides untold numbers of anonymous people. To help me navigate this landscape , I can invent my own names just as I did as a child, only this time the names will relate to, or be those of my ancestors; they will refer to dates and facts I have gleaned about their lives. In this sense I am labelling an unfamiliar, temporal landscape with familiar names, a landscape that like the battlefields of the Front has been all but destroyed. I’m filling in the gaps, mapping myself not only onto the physical world but also the past.

The worlds I invented as a child were in many ways idealised views of the real world with unspoilt forests, mediaeval cities and unpolluted seas. What faced the man at the Front was the opposite, a terrible vision of what the world could be or had become. Labelling such a world with names like Piccadilly, Buckingham Palace Road, Marylebone Road, Liverpool Street, Trafalgar Square and so on, in some ways gave it a more human face; where there were gaps, such names would fill them in perhaps with memories of home.

In the end maps are there to guide us, to reveal something about a place or perhaps a person; it all depends of course on what the map represents. We might be looking at maps of countries or maps of the brain – Katherine Harmon’s book ‘Personal Geographies and other Maps of the Imagination‘ is a great resource in this respect. When I look at the map of my invented world, I am not so much presented with a means of navigating a fictional world but rather a map of my own childhood. Looking at the place names I can in fact see the real world as it was at the time. The map therefore becomes a representation of something entirely different. The same could be said of the Trench Maps. They are maps of something quite unimaginable; if we took one and stood on a battlefield today it might offer us a hint of the way things were. But with the names of the trenches, roads, farms and cottages, they become maps of somewhere entirely different – a fictional place built only from memories. But those memories conjured by the names listed above – Piccadilly, Trafalgar Square etc. – are our memories, we can only imagine Trafalgar Square as it is today or as it is within our own minds. What we can establish, with the help of these maps, is an understanding of a sense of dislocation, between the solider in the trenches and his life back home. They serve to make those who fought and died in the war much more real.

With regards a map of my family tree I can place my ancestors in different parts of the country but of course none of them lived their lives standing still. Again there are gaps to be filled and whereas to fill in the gaps of history one can use one’s imagination, with regards the mapping of my ancestry and individual people, it is through walking around the places that they inhabited that these gaps can be filled. To close, I return to the blog entry I made during a residency at OVADA. In it I wrote:

“These invented worlds became, as I grew up, the ‘invented’ or imagined landscapes of Oxford’s past; landscapes that were – just as they still are – created from fragments, parts of the past which are still extant in the city; old buildings, walls, objects and so on. Between these structures, these fragments, I would fill the gaps, with my own imagination, with thoughts derived from my own experience. The city’s past and the past in general, as it exists within my mind, is then, to use the metaphor of cloning in Jurassic Park, a cloned dinosaur. The extant buildings, structures and objects within museums, are like the mosquitoes trapped inside the amber. They are broken strands of DNA. All that is required is for me to fill the gaps, and this I can do with my own DNA. I am in effect, the frog.
This metaphor is interesting in that DNA patterns are, of course, unique to everyone. My DNA is different to everybody else’s as there’s is to mine. Therefore, using my imagination to plug in the gaps of the past, means that the ‘past’ will comprise large parts of my own experience; my dinosaur will contain elements of my own being. (See ‘Postcard 1906’). But although my DNA is unique, it is nonetheless derived from my own past, elements have been passed down by my ancestors from time immemorial. The code which makes me who I am, comprises parts of people I know now (parents and grandmothers), people I knew (grandfathers and great-grandmother) and people lost to the past altogether (great-great grandparents and so on). What interests me about this, is that, through stating above how ‘my dinosaur will contain elements of my own being’ I can now see that ‘my dinosaur’ will contain elements of my own being, which is itself comprised of elements of hundreds – thousands – of people, the majority of whom I will of course never know and who have been dead for centuries. I like to think therefore, that ‘my dinosaur’ and my imagination aren’t entirely unique.”

In the traditional diagram of the family tree each individual is isolated, joined to others by means of a single line, almost as if they appeared at one point, moved a bit and passed the baton on to the next in line. Of course things are much more complex than this; individuals overlap in terms of the length of their lives and if we were to try and represent an individual’s journey through life, the line would be impossibly complex. Inevitably there are gaps which as I’ve said I can fill (at least, in part) by walking in the places they would have walked. In Wales, where my Grandmother grew up I found it incredible to think that this place I’d never been to and the streets, lanes and hills I had never walked, had all played a part in my existence. Without them I would not be here, or indeed there. I was then filling in the gaps, like the frog DNA in Jurassic Park, but the dinosaur I spoke of in the extract above was not so much History in this case, but me.

© Nicholas Hedges 2024