Mine the Mountain 2
Works
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A Well Staring at the Sky (Flash Version)
1500,0000 (Flash Version)
Mine (Flash Version)
The Wall (Front and Back V)
Piccadilly Circus S 27 b
If I Was a Place
The Past is a Foreign Country
Lifelines
The Place That's Always There
Broken Toys
Correspondence 1914-15 (Flash Versions: 1 2 3)
Great-Grandparents c.1914
Jonah Rogers (1893-1915)
World War One Postcard
Holiday Snaps
Postcards
Oświęcim
A Well Staring at the Sky
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 shared between two people.
1500,0000
Between March and October 1942, around 500,000 men, women and children were deported and murdered at the Bełżec Death Camp in Poland. The overall image shown in this work is an aerial view of the camp taken in 1944, a year after it was razed to the ground by the Nazis. Each postcard contains the name of a town or village and underneath the number of people deported from those places to their deaths.
Mine
The images along the top of this work are views around Hafodyrynys, Wales; the area in which my Grandmother grew up and where my ancestors worked in the mines. When my grandmother talked about her childhood, she recalled the mountain on which she used to play and that over which her father would walk to work in the mines at Llanhilleth. Many of my ancestors were miners and suffered because of the very tough conditions. My grandmother remembered how miners were often brought from below ground having been killed in accidents, and this image of the dead being brought to the surface from beneath the mountain became in my mind a metaphor for the act of researching, of finding ways of identifying with those who have not only disappeared from the world, but are all but lost to history.
The work is in many respects a tribute to those who died in the mines, or through subsequent illness like my great-grandfather who died at the age of 47. It comprises 90 postcards most of which are blackened with an x ‘scratched’ into them. Almost all of my ancestors in Wales at the time could neither read nor write. Documents such as wedding certificates are all signed with Xs - a mark which denotes their presence but one which is at once anonymous. The work is also inspired by an ancestor I discovered whilst researching in Wales, my great-great-uncle Jonah Rogers who was killed in the First World War who, like many thousands of men has no known grave. He was also a miner and in this respect the Xs might be taken as marking the location of many unknown graves somewhere in the battlefields of Flanders.
The Wall (Front and Back V)
Visiting battlefield sites such as Ypres and Verdun, one is confronted by the First World War’s dreadful toll; hundreds of thousands of men killed in action. One can walk for hours in immaculate cemeteries, passing along row upon row of perfect headstones. Millions lost their lives, many lost even their names; some all but vanished from the face of the Earth, as if they’d never existed.
This work comprises reproductions of the backs of postcards printed during the First World War. The front side of those postcards used in the work each showed a soldier, either posed alone or with their families often before they headed for the trenches. When we visit graves in War Cemeteries, we see the name and a headstone and not the life behind it. The ‘T’ shaped divides on the backs of postcards remind me of these headstones and in particular the makeshift markers planted in battlefields. As lines dividing ‘correspondence’ and ‘address’ they remind us of the lives we never see; the soldiers' families back at home.
My great-great-uncle Jonah Rogers was killed in the Second Battle of Ypres. The names and addresses shown here, including that of his parents, are the next of kin of those who died in his Battalion; the 2nd Battalion of the Monmouthshire Regiment.
Piccadilly Circus S 27 b
Using the same postcards described in The Wall (Front and Back V), the faces in this work are those family members pictured with brothers, husbands and sons before they went to war. The gaps in between are segments of an aerial view of a battlefield, overlaid in part with wartime trench maps, each showing places with names taken from home; Oxford Road, Monmouth Cottage and, as per the title of this work, Piccadilly Circus.
The landscape of the Western Front, the ‘topography of Golgotha’ as Wilfred Owen called it, was a barren, destroyed wasteland, a void in which – from the perspective of the present - these more familiar place names gave it a sense of place, where memories of places more familiar were used to construct a landscape, where in fact there wasn’t one at all. Before long, memories and turned earth were all that remained to be mapped. Memories and turned earth was often all that remained for the families back at home.
The S 27 b in the title refers to the location of Piccadilly Circus on its particular trench map.
If I Was a Place
A contemporary reproduction of a map I made as a child, this map is essentially a map of an individual - of me, as I was at the time. It is a place that, although imagined, was for me real, one based on fragments of my memory and my perception of the distant past.
Whilst in Wales, imagining my distant forebears walking the various tracks and roads around the place my grandmother grew up, I realised how I was very much a part of those places and they in turn were part of who I was. I had existed - at least potentially - in those places long before I was born.
All those roads, paths and trackways led in the 'end' to me. And just as my invented world - my map of me - comprised those bits of the past I loved to imagine as a child (the untouched forests, the unpolluted rivers and streams) so I began to recognise how this foreshadowed my current thoughts on history; how I am (as we all are) a ‘place’, one made of all those places in which my ancestors walked, lived and died.
The Past is a Foreign Country
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
John Donne (1572-1631) XVII Meditation
The outline of this second imagined island is based on the outline of the Bełżec Death Camp as photographed in 1944. Our reconstruction of the past – that of our own and that of something as horrific as the Holocaust - can only take place within our imagination. That is what this image represents and when seen next to the map I made as a child it becomes the map of another individual, another child.
I came across the supporting text by Rutka Laskier following a visit I made to her hometown of Będzin in Poland. She’s describing what appears to be an imaginary landscape, though one perhaps based on memories of family holidays to Zakopane. She was a child when she died in the Holocaust and by putting the two maps together, I want to reflect on the numbers of children who perished, as well as illustrating how within each child - within everyone - the whole of humanity is immanent, a sentiment reflected in the words of the poet, John Donne, above.
Supporting text:
Rutka Laskier
(died in Auschwitz, aged 14)
In the Mountains
At daybreak I got up and ran to the window. A tiny bit of the golden
sun was already peeking through the horizon. I dressed up, packed
my knapsack, picked up a hiking stick and left. After less than thirty
minutes I arrived at the foot of the mountain. I started climbing.
From the valley I could hear the murmur of the river mingle with
the sound of the church bells. Beyond the branches of the pine trees
the mountain peaks appeared.
Along the barely visible path, through the entangled pale bushes and
the raspberry bushes and the thorny gooseberry bushes, I climbed
higher and higher. I jumped from one stone to another, above trunks
of fallen trees; I found my way through the entangled bushes. Before
me the peaks of the giant mountains rose. The long weeds wept and
covered the slopes. The cowbells sounded like moaning, heard from
far away.
More and more often rocks blocked my way, the mass of rocks
rose high, piles of rocks, stained here and there with lichens and
green-blue moss, and somewhere else, roots of trees were twisted
like coiled snakes. The [enveloped] rocks sank under my feet into
reddish moss, and when I stepped on them, I gently sank into it. The
curled greenery of blackberries and gooseberries stretched out its
arms into the moss, and above it all, the purple-blue blackberries
were sprinkled like dew.
I sat down there. Above me the pine trees were growling and the
rustle of the needles merged with the paddling of the stream. The
sun flooded the mountain with its golden rays and outlined the green
of the grass. In the distance, a thin bluish streak of smoke lit by
shepherds could be seen far away.
Lifelines
This map is a mix of two; one I made as a child; the other, a trench map from the First World War which shows the location (near Mouse Trap Farm) where my great-great-uncle was killed.
The names on the map (amongst others; Paradise Alley, Oxford Road, Admiral’s Road and No Man’s Cottage) coupled with the fact the place it represented was, in reality, entirely destroyed makes it appear like a world that’s been imagined – much like my own on which it’s superimposed. And if all the tracks and roads my forebears walked in Wales led to me being born, one might say as well, that those tracks on the battlefield where my great-great-uncle fought and fell also led there.
Looking back from the perspective of the present, one gets the sense with the First World War, that history somehow got ahead of itself. Such was the swift and massive destruction which until then had never been seen on such a scale, and such was the tremendous loss of life, it was as if the shattered world in which it was fought had to be imagined first rather than after the fact.
The Place That's Always There
Whilst standing by the sea one day, I realised that long before man existed, the sound of the sea was just as it was now. This image comprises pieces cut from old family photographs of holidays spent in Dorset. All the people in those photos (those other than members of my family) can be seen in Broken Toys; and this empty landscape, pieced together with what’s left over, illustrates the fact that long after we’re gone, the sea will still sound just the same.
Broken Toys
This work comprises details of old family photographs of holidays spent in Dorset. The subject of the photographs from which these details are taken are of course members of my family, but as with any history, there’s always more than one point of view.
In the foreword to Peter Weiss' book The Aesthetics of Resistance, Frederic Jameson writes that for Georg Lukács:
“…the "world-historical individual" must never be the protagonist of the historical novel, but only viewed from afar, by the average or mediocre witness.”
The title of the work comes from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies, in which he writes:
“It’s true enough, of course, no longer to live
on earth is strange, to abandon customs
barely mastered yet, not to interpret roses
and other auspicious things, not give them meaning
in a human future. No longer to be as we have
always been, in those endlessly anxious hands –
to leave even our name behind us as a child
leaves off playing with a broken toy. Strange,
no longer to know desires desired - strange
to witness the involvement of all things lost
suddenly, each drifting away singly into space.
And truly, to be dead is hard, so full of making
up lost ground, till little by little we find
a trace of eternity. Yet, the living are wrong
to draw such distinctions so clearly:
angels (it is said) are often never quite sure
whether they pass among the living or the dead.”
Correspondence 1914-15
These three works comprise scenes I photographed in Ypres not far from the place my great-great-uncle, Jonah Rogers, died on May 8th (my birthday) 1915. Each image is again divided into postcard-sized views and ‘in the ground’ are T-shaped divides found on the backs of postcards, dividing correspondence and address.
Suggesting the fact that wherever one stands in places such as this, a man may have fallen, the divides resemble makeshift grave-markers. The text on the left-hand side of every one is taken from a diary written by a soldier serving with the 1st Battalion of the Monmouthshire Regiment.
Great-Grandparents c.1914
Jonah Rogers (1893 - 1915)
World War One Postcard
Holiday Snaps
Postcards
Oświęcim
Oświęcim is the Polish town the Nazis called Auschwitz. These images of people relaxing before the Second World War were found in Auschwitz after the camp’s liberation.
The name Auschwitz is known by almost everyone today, yet very few know the proper name of the place where it stands. There’s a temporal divide, dividing its names and identities before and after the war. Many of those photographed perished in Auschwitz, and so, seeing them here in happier times, I’ve used the title Oświęcim to denote the time before the horrors of the Holocaust.