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WW1 soldiers remembered in
poignant art installation
AN Edge Hill University academic has
created a multimedia art installation remembering soldiers from the First World
War.
Professor Helen Newall's work provides a powerful visual and sensory experience
which brings the soldiers depicted in salvaged original photographs back to our
attention in the present. Audiences will be able to experience the installation,
entitled:- 'Remember' Me, at the University's annual:-
'Festival of Ideas,' in June 2017, and at other North West locations in
the coming months, including the Cheshire Military Museum, Chester in July 2017.
After initially collecting original photographs of soldiers to use in
projections as part of her acclaimed First World War play:- 'Silent
Night,' Helen then embarked on what began as a personal project to
create the installation. The constantly evolving piece was recently set up for
members of the public to experience at Narberth Museum, Pembrokeshire, where
visitors hailed it emotive, powerful and thought provoking.
Helen Newall said:- "I have been collecting original photographs of Great
War soldiers from antique shops and auctions for a while. As some commentators
on First World War photography have noted, these men often had photographs taken
for the first time because they thought it might be the last time they would get
the chance. It really bothered me that I didn't know who the people in these
photos were, and I sought to change the people in the pictures from valuable
collectible 'objects' back into subjects again. The work is a
tension between the old technology of glass plate cameras; the chemical
processes used to create cardboard photographic objects, and the new digital
processes that make virtual images that often exist only in computer pixels and
clouds and streams."
As well as visual projections and soundscapes, the installation, described by
Professor Newall as a 'miniature museum,’ also features physical
photographs and relics from the trenches including a German bullet and a Vest
Pocket Kodak camera, used by a soldier.
Helen Newall said:- "The installation is still evolving, as I'm still
discovering pictures and relics. Just recently I found a cap badge which matches
one a soldier is wearing in 1 of the photographs, so that is the latest
addition."
The work also has a personal significance to Professor Newall. She said:-
"At the time I was making this work in 2014, my father was dying of Alzheimer's
disease, and it occurred to me that his gradual separation from his identity
paralleled the way in which the subjects of these photographs were being
separated from theirs. This work is thus dedicated to my father and to his
uncle, James Caldwell, after whom he was named, and who was killed at the Front
in 1916. His body was never found, his name appears on the Thiepval Memorial
which lists over 72,000 names of those missing on the Somme." |
