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Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) saw action at both Ypres and the Somme and was awarded the Military Cross. A friend of Siegfried Sassoon, he became a fellow of Merton College, Oxford in 1931 where he remained until 1944, returning to the city in 1968 as Professor of Poetry.

I found the following poem in The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry.

1916 seen from 1921

Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day,
I sit in solitude and only hear
Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay,
The lost intensities of hope and fear;
In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,
On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,
The very books I read are there - and I
Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags

Its wounded length from those sad streets of war
Into green places here, that were my own;
But now what once was mine is mine no more,
I seek such neighbours here and I find none.
With such strong gentleness and tireless will
Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.

I rise up at the singing of a bird
And scarcely knowing slink along the lane,
I dare not give a soul a look or word
Where all have homes and none's at home in vain:
Deep red the rose burned in the grim redoubt,
The self-sown wheat around was like a flood,
In the hot path the lizard lolled time out,
The saints in broken shrines were bright as blood.

Sweet Mary's shrine between the sycamores!
There we would go, my friend of friends and I,
And snatch long moments from the grudging wars,
Whose dark made light intense to see them by.
Shrewd bit the morning fog, the whining shots
Spun from the wrangling wire: then in warm swoon
The sun hushed all but the cool orchard plots,
We crept in the tall grass and slept till noon.

This is a beautiful poem, three lines of which struck me in particular:

Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.

As part of my research for my OVADA residency I have been looking at the area of Oxford in which the OVADA gallery is situated (Gloucester Green) a place which following the Black Death was known as 'Broken Hayes'. At this time (c.1348/49) many parts of the town - decimated by the plague - were empty, and Blunden's lines seem to describe perfectly this sense of emptiness, reflection and loss.

"The light of the moon covers the earth, yet it can be contained in a single bowl of water."
Dogen Zenji (1200 - 1253)

"Headlights illuminated a large area with a deep oval-shaped pit in the middle. At its bottom a pool of water had formed in which the moon was mirrored."
Filip Muller - Eyewitness Auschwitz

"The Moon shines with so blue a light
Over the City,
Where a decaying generation
Lives cold and evil -
A dark future prepared
For the pale grandchild."
Georg Trakl

The following text can be found on my website under Places. Click here for more on Ieper.

"I should like us to acquire the whole of the ruins of Ypres.. a more sacred place for the British race does not exist in the world."

Winston Churchill's quote regarding the fate of the ruined town provides an interesting backdrop to the whole subject of how to remember the past, particularly a past so bound up in the unimaginable violence of The Great War. How should we honour and remember the hundreds of thousands who fought and died in and around this area?

At 8.00pm every evening, The Last Post is played beneath the huge memorial that is the Menin Gate; massive yet dignified, somehow understated yet a great presence in the town. Crowds gather, tributes are laid, and the melancholic refrain coruscates around the gate's vast interior. Perhaps the crowds and the cameras do correlate with what Siegfried Sassoon said about it being a 'sight-seers centre', but there was something particularly moving about the ceremony. Sassoon had seen as first hand the unimaginable horrors of what happened in the fields around Flanders, and just as I stated in my work with Auschwitz-Birkenau, we can never know what it was like to be there. No photographs, no poems, no letters written in the trenches can ever give us the full picture, but we can at least try, and personally, I found the ceremony gave me this chance.

Before we visited the gate, my girlfriend and I made our way to the two cemeteries within the town, The Ramparts Cemetery and the Ypres Reservoir Cemetery. I have seen countless photographs of places like this but nothing prepares you for what it's like to be standing amidst two thousand immaculate graves, many without names. As I listened to the buglers play The Last Post, I closed my eyes and imagined how every night this same sound rang out from the gate, over the adjacent fields, searching out the bodies of the 54,896 men whose names are recorded on the gate's walls. The tune is like a calling, a mother's lament for a lost son. Every night it asks its question, and every night it is met with silence; the silence of the fields once deafened by death and violence.

Rebuilding or otherwise, preserving and restoring are all elements which feature in any tour around Ieper. The Sanctuary Wood museum (Hill 62) is to some controversial in that many believe the trenches preserved there are not actually genuine. Certainly there are aspects of the museum I didn't particularly like. Personally I believe the trenches are genuine but are perhaps a little over-restored. With a party of school children running around them, there was the sense that this was little more than an adventure playground and not a place which one officer recalled in his dairy of 1917:

"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."

As I've said, we can never know what it was really like to be in that Hell on Earth, but I believe the residues of war, the shrapnel, the objects dug from out the ground, along with the craters and the blasted trees are testament enough to the horrors. If the trenches were left and allowed to be reclaimed (although not removed) by nature, I don't think the impact would be lessened; quite the opposite - it would be enhanced.

Evidence supporting this claim can be found just a couple of miles away on Hill 60. Unlike Hill 62, this place has been left much as it was at the end of war and as such, it has an air of authenticity about it which one doesn't quite get with the trenches of Hill 62 (I should state here that there is no doubt about the provenance of Sanctuary Wood itself, the craters, the shot trees and recovered objects). The craters of Hill 60, the undulating and wholly unnatural shape of the landscape, now grown over with grass are enough to inspire the imagination to thoughts of what happened there 90 years ago. It is perhaps this dramatic contrast between now and then which facilitates this: the grass, the trees, the birds; (the birds which inspired some of the most poignant words to come from out the trenches). That and the knowledge that many men from both sides still lay buried beneath the ground. I was also reminded as I walked over the grass, of the parks one might find back home - a place for people to relax, for children to play in - a place to forget all your worries. This contrast again served to remind me of the horror and futility of war.

I received news today that I have been offered a residency (entitled Residue) at OVADA in Oxford city centre. This will culminate in an exhibition at the gallery in May as part of Oxfordshire Artweeks. More details will follow in due course.

A few days ago (Wednesday, 14th March) I looked at how people sometimes question the relevance of events such as the Holocaust and how some do not wish to participate in or view works (whether art, photography, documentary or film) which deal with such a difficult subject. I quoted Henri Begson and after reading Gaston Bachelard's 'The Poetics of Space', I came upon this quote regarding Eugene Minkowski:

"Minkowski followed Bergson in accepting the notion on 'elan vital' as the dynamic origin of human life. Referring to Tymienwicka's book 'Phenomenology and Science' we can say that for Minkowski, the essence of life is not 'a feeling of being, of existence' but a feeling of participation in flowing onward, necessarily expressed in terms of time and secondarily expressed in terms of space."

In this quote, I read that we are all somehow partipants of the same past, the same space; that events 60 years ago in Poland are just as relevant as they are now. Bergson's quote equating the past's existence with that of objects warns us that just because we do not look does not mean that the past stops - in effect, one might say that the horrors of the past continue to this day; they are happening all the time.

The main theme of much of my work has so far been the Holocaust and in particular its sites, such as those at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec and Babi Yar. I've also been studying memory and how memories within objects and buildings might allow us a glimpse of the past; a theme which has fascinated me ever since I was a child. It was through reading Bill Viola's writings a few months back that I was reminded of the mnemonic techniques practiced by the ancient Greeks:

"The idea of art as a kind of diagram has for the most part not made it down from the Middle Ages into modern European Consciousness. The Renaissance was the turning point... The structural aspect of art, and the idea of a 'data-space' was preserved through the Renaissance however in the continued relations between image and architecture. Painting became an architectural, spatial form which the viewer experienced by physically walking through it. The older concept of an idea and an image architecture, a memory 'place' like the mnemonic temples of the Greeks is carried through in the great European cathedrals and palaces, as is the relation between memory, spatial movement and storage (recording) of ideas."

When I first read this quote, I was at the time researching The University Parks in Oxford, and in particular examining the plaques on the benches. I realised then, that my act of walking and 'remembering' those who have passed away, was in a broad and rather loose sense, like walking through one of those 'mnemonic temples' albeit in a physical sense. I was constructing a bigger picture of the place.

More recently, walking has started to play an important role in my work on the Holocaust (one of the themes which has struck me through my research has been that of walking. Many photos of the Holocaust show people walking, usually, and tragically, to their deaths). I've started to look at the Operation Reinhard camps and in particular Belzec. Laurence Rees, in his book, 'Auschwitz', describes the unimaginable scale of death and contrasts it with the disproportionately tiny size of Belzec Death Camp, which measured less less than 300m x 300m. I knew this was a small size, but it wasn't until I walked around some familiar spaces in Oxford - including the University Parks - that I realised just how small it was.

Since then I've started looking for more evidence of the size of Belzec (and other camps) so that I might walk specific distances around the city, and have since discovered a number of maps drawn by survivors, SS men and archaeologists. These roughly sketched maps, these 'memories,' are a poignant reminder of the camp's existence and might help me in my attempts to bring people closer to the Holocaust, which should never be forgotten.

"All things fade away in time, but time itself is made fadeless and undying by recollection." Apollonius of Tyana

"We have to describe and to explain a building the upper story of which was erected in the nineteenth century; the ground-floor dates from the sixteenth century, and a careful examination of the masonry discloses the fact that it was reconstructed from a dwelling-tower of the eleventh century. In the cellar we discover Roman foundation walls, and under the cellar a filled-in cave, in the floor of which stone tool are found and remnants of glacial fauna is the layers below... Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are 'housed'." C.G. Jung

"Memory, whether individual or generational, political or public is always more than the prison house of the past." Andreas Huyssen

Here I must return to the ancient Greeks and their mnenomic temples. With a place or loci, such as a house, fixed in the mind, the person remembering would place various objects in its rooms ("...what I have spoken of as being done in a house can also be done in public buildings, or on a long journey, or going through a city..."), objects which by association would remind them of part of the whole thing - such as a speech - to be remembered. Here I saw at once a correlation with my work on Belzec. The ancient Greeks were walking as a means of remembering, of not forgetting; their memory loci were in effect maps which one could sketch, maps of the mind. Therefore, the maps drawn by survivors, are in effect maps of their minds and bring us closer to the horrors of the time - closer to the individuals who suffered.

The fact that objects were used to create associations, and therefore build (through 'walking') a bigger 'picture' of something also fits in with the recent work I've been doing on Auschwitz, looking at the possessions left by the victims and trying to build a picture of the individuals before the Holocaust, to see them not only as victims, but people who lived lives before its horror.

Through walking distances which I've taken from descriptions of the camp, I have found myself walking back into my own past and the past of the city in general; for example, walking the route of Cuckoo Lane and the Old London Road at Shotover. My own past confirms my individuality and the past of the city confirms my place as a small part in the mass of memories associated with this place (this also correlates with my work on Auschwitz, trying to find the individuals amongst the huge number of dead, individual possessions from amongst the mountains, names rather than inconceivable numbers). The fact these walks have been derived from a map or a description of Belzec, helps me to identify further with the individuals who suffered there; not because I can in anyway conceive of their suffering - no-one could ever imagine the horrors they endured - but because I can imagine their own pasts and that of the places they knew so well, places from which they were taken to their deaths.

I found this artist's work whilst looking on the web for maps of Belzec. He's created fourteen extraordinary charcoal drawings of different Holocaust sites and in a statement says the following:

"Under no condition can art express the Holocaust. To withdraw art from confronting this horror, however, is to assign victory to its perpetrators."

Following on from some of the feedback I received yesterday, I found this particularly pertinent.

Following on from the collaborative work Austin and I presented yesterday, I was thinking about those comments from people who did not wish to engage with the work and the idea of people turning their backs (not out of spite) on difficult subjects. In respect of the Holocaust, people often say 'it's in the past, what relevance does it have for today?' The following quote is from Henri Bergson:

"There will no longer be any more reason to say that the past effaces itself as soon as it's perceived, than there is to suppose that individual objects cease to exist when we cease to perceive them."

I find this quote particularly pertinent in that it suggests a correlation between how we perceive the past and how we perceive objects; in effect there is no difference at all. With much of my work focusing on objects and memory, its resonance is particularly striking.

Today, I, along with fellow student, Austin, presented some work in progress which we've been developing over the last few weeks. The origins of the project was a piece which I'd planned concerning my difficulty in 'finding individuals' amongst the countless victims of the Holocaust - particularly when faced with a mountain of shoes and suitcases, as was the case in Auschwitz. I'd intended to ask people to bring in a piece of luggage containing a selection of personal items, and having seen Austin's work with text and sound, thought it would be good to put the two together. His sound work consisted of a group of people reading the same prepared piece of text and resulted in a sound that was at first a mass of tangled voices, ending with just one. This illustrated perfectly the idea of looking for a single object, for an individual amongst a mass of objects; amongst countless numbers of dead.

The process of the piece was as follows. People brought in bags of objects as requested, whereupon, on my own, I emptied the luggage, and documented the contents. I then piled them in the middle of the room and asked people to come inside. Having had time to study the pile, Austin initiated the first sound work of the performance, dividing viewers into two (men and women) and then again, as if arranging a choir. They were then asked to read a prepared text - lists of people Austin had seen during specific intervals on a specific date: a young man, a middle-aged man etc. - which they did, the result of which was as hoped, a mass of voices ending with just one.

For the second part I sorted the possessions into six piles (one for shoes, one for clothes etc.) and then Austin asked everyone to read (this time positioned individually around the objects) from a second list which was itself a sorted version of the first text. Again the results were the same, albeit with a different sound; many voices becoming just one.

The last part of the piece was getting people to take their bags and reclaim their possessions from amongst the piles, in effect reclaiming their individuality.

Reactions to the piece were mixed. Some saw the sound work as being a separate thing altogether, others saw them both as a whole. Some felt the piece to be difficult and challenging (as expected) and one felt it 'offensive' (although not as far as I could tell in respect of the victims of the Holocaust). Dealing with a subject as emotional and as difficult as this presents the artist with many challenges, but ones which he or she must not shy away from. Equally, potential audiences should be encouraged not to 'turn away' from such works - some today clearly didn't want to engage with the work at all - as this only serves to illustrate how easy it is for us now, just as it was then, to pretend that nothing bad is happening in the world.

This was a work primarily about the Holocaust, but atrocities occur every day; not on the scale of the Holocaust perhaps, but nevertheless, a murder is still the death of an individual, wherever, whenever or however it occurs.