Mine the Mountain 3
Reviews
Written by Sarah Mayhew in The Guide, Oxford Mail
Who do you think you are? A question that has crossed most of our minds at some point in our lives. A question that has inspired television programmes, books, and hordes of the recently retired to dig deep into their little-known past in the hope of unearthing something that might shed light on a mystery, inform the present, perhaps even inform the future.
Mine the Mountain is an exhibition of large photographic anthropological installations.
Nicholas Hedges, the artist, maps histories that he has interpreted not as a series of distant events that are dead and buried, but as a collection of encounters and dialogues between the past and the present, histories that resound in the here and now.
Indeed, as Hedges has said: “Family history has played a vital role in my work and my research, enabling me to find anonymous individuals to whom I am related and to explore the places in which they were born, where they lived and died, to walk the roads, tracks and paths which have led to my existence.”
Following a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2006, Hedges developed a deep-seated need to connect with his ancestry and a fascination in exploring sites of historic trauma.
Intrigued by the notion of “dark tourists”, Mine the Mountain examines the needs of those that feel compelled to visit such sites of mass destruction.
Deeply moved by the anonymity of casualties of atrocities past, Hedges has spent the past four years identifying with the individuals behind the horrific, intangible statistics.
Hedges found his answer in an idea shared with celebrated landscape artist Richard Long; the notion that, as we make journeys, the mark that we make “writes” us into the landscape.
Mine the Mountain shows an intelligent, thought-provoking body of work. A beautifully poetic, bittersweet artistic means of recovering the past, and engaging in a dialogue with those who’ve gone before us.
This exhibition highlights how, far from being empty, places like Auschwitz-Birkenau and the battlefields of the Somme are full of lines, or Hedges’ intricate haberdashery of threads; paths followed and written by hundreds of thousands of people.
The battlefields of Europe and the so-called dark tourist sites of former concentration camps have long attracted the attention of artists seeking to make sense - and art - from the suffering of the past.
Now a new exhibition at the North Wall Art Gallery in Oxford adds to this tradition by taking a very personal view of these sites of memory, trauma and mourning.
Nicholas Hedges' photographic installations and paintings are concerned with history- not as a series of distant events, but as a collection of encounters and dialogues between the past and the present that are very much a part of now.
The resulting photographic assemblages are drawn form experiences at sites ranging from the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec and Majdanek to the First World War battlefields of Ypres and Verdun.
Built up of collected images, photographs and writings, the works fuse family history, memories and the private histories of unknown individuals.
"What their component images say, echoes my attempt to find the individual so often subsumed, both in unimaginable numbers and the history which we read in books or know through film and television," says Hedges.
"As a descendent of tailors and miners, it is perhaps appropriate that my work is concerned with lines and traces, and the weave and texture of pathways taken by people throughout their lives over the course of history."
The exploration of his own family history has played a vital role in the work, exploring the places where they were born, where they lived and died, and in his own words, the "roads which they have walked."
Written by Helen Peacock in The Oxford Times
Four years ago Oxford artist Nicholas Hedges walked out of Auschwitz concentration camp, having visited as a tourist. As he left, he realised that while he was free to walk away from this site of trauma, most of the prisoners incarcerated there during the war were never free to leave. That realisation and the mass slaughter that had taken place behind the camp’s walls affected him deeply.
His mixed-media exhibition Mine the Mountain, on show at the North Wall Gallery, Summertown, until June 26, draws on his experiences of places such as Auschwitz – Birkenau, Belzec, Majdanek, Ypres and Verdun and explores the notion of both the “dark tourist” and a tourism of the self.
Because he was confronted by mountains of shoes and piles of ash, rather than individuals, during his travels, Nicholas took one more trip. This time he visited the site of a Welsh mine that had once employed members of the Hedges family, but all he found in this attempt to conduct a dialogue with his ancestors was a list of names.
What you will see on entering the gallery are several collections of photography and postcards linking back to the First and Second World Wars, and a list of the miners’ names mounted on postcards. You will also notice worn old deckchairs hanging on the gallery wall, which would have once offered people a comfortable seat but are now both broken and empty. Group photographs that include empty deckchairs are also included in the exhibition. One series of photographs displays enlargements of the individual faces captured in the group shots — this is Nicholas’s attempt to overcome the facelessness of mass slaughter.
He sums up his exhibition by saying: “Having stood upon the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and having walked away, I wanted to explore my relationship, as an individual, with the past, with history itself, and so began to mine my own past, the mountain of anonymous people I call my ancestors.”