Drawing : Trench Art

Detail: Shellcase vase

One of my earliest memories of being interested in an art form is of my gran polishing the two brass shell cases that had been engraved and embossed with designs that stood in the fireplace of my grandparents' home in Pensnett. These things are now formally classified under the term 'Trench Art' but to my family they were 'tranculments', a Black Country word meaning 'ornaments and decorative objects typically found on mantlepieces and other places around the house'. These were objects that had a special significance for my gran in particular, as they were tied into her forever grieving for her brother who had been shot through the heart in1917. If I ever asked about these shell cases, my gran would tell me all about her brother, and at the time I thought they must have been made by him, but I don't think that was actually the case. I think they were bought as memory souvenirs after the war or maybe even brought back by my grandfather who had been stationed in India, away from the horrors of trench warfare. Whatever their provenance, I was fascinated by them. You could examine the bottoms and they were clearly working devices, devices made to carry the cordite propellant for the firing of shells. They were embedded into the history of their use and as a boy I was very aware of war and what shells were used for. On the other hand they were decorated and you could see how someone had worked the metal by punching it from inside and engraving it from the outside. The craftsmanship exhibited quite a sophisticated understanding of metal, so these may well have been made by Belgian metal workers using some of the thousands of shell cases left over after the war.

Many years ago I drew them and I have found two images of the drawings on an old hard disk file. Both images though for some reason cropped. The shell cases were used as flower vases and perhaps I was reminded of them because of a recent visit back to Ukraine by our lodger, who has been staying with us as an escape from the war over there. She came back with some photographs she had taken of bullet holes turned into flowers. Apparently this image is now common in Ukraine, and I was able to find several online such as the one below.

War is a horrible but very human thing, my generation being the first for a while in the UK to avoid having to go and fight. I remember wanting to draw the shell cases because of their transformation from objects of death dealing violence into reminders of the fact that humans can also be creative and can build intense relationships with materials that don't lead to destruction, and instead open out a potential for beauty.

Detail: Shellcase vase

As I was making the drawings I realised that the foliage emerging from the top could also be read as marks made to represent a gun or cannon firing.

After a long search brought upon myself because of my failure to organise files, I eventually found uncropped images of the two drawings. Seeing them again reminded me that at the time I was making drawings about looking, which means that the images read as much about the struggle to claim a relationship with a space, as about the shellcases as objects. At the time, drawing for myself was about trying to find a relationship with the space both objects and myself inhabited. I have a lot of empathy with a past self that struggled to make the white space of the paper into an extension of both mine and the brass shellcase's space. I have had a similar obsession for many years now, each time perhaps approaching it in a different way, but always associated with a puzzlement about how to engage with looking and how to re-create the energy of the experience. The conjunction of flowers and armaments, also reminded me of another image, an image from the time when I was a hippy and we were all convinced of the reality of flower power. Each of us feel the continuing effects of history, but each experience of it is unique.

October 21, 1967: March on the Pentagon by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Protester George Harris placing a carnation into the barrel of an M14 rifle held by a soldier of the 503rd Military Police Battalion

Drawings in pencil, wax crayon, watercolour and ink.

Because as a boy I was the only member of the family interested in my great uncle's fate, his diary and other personal effects were passed on to me not long after my grandparents died. He had been shot through his breast pocket, therefore the bullet went through the notebook and diary he had in it. These items had a powerful resonance and still do.

The Human body English / French: Great Uncle Harry's soldier's notebook

It was expected that a soldier was at some point going to need to speak some French and in particular it might well be in a situation whereby some part of his body was in need of treatment. Therefore soldiers were issued with a handy reminder of what to say.

Great uncle Harry's diary indicating the day he went on the Somme.

The bullet that killed him went through the bottom edge of the diary, almost going through an image of an underwater mine, an image I would redraw just over 100 years later for an article 'Revealing the invisible: The virus is looking at you', whereby I looked at how the corona virus had been represented and how it could be read as a type of ‘dark star’ or anti-sun. In the article I used my own very simplified drawing of a mine to show how closely its structure echoed the way the virus was sometimes represented. I was very aware that World War I claimed an estimated 16 million lives, but in comparison the influenza epidemic that swept the world in 1918 killed an estimated 50 million people. The drawing of a mine was my private acknowledgement of how great uncle Harry still shapes some of my thoughts, his memory passed to me by his sister, and now passed on to anyone who cares to read this blog.

The corona virus

Drawing of an undersea mine

Drawing

Monday 14 August 2023

Trench Art

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