Biography/Autobiography. The 12th collaboration on 3.0 artistsbooksning initiated by Cheryl Penn (SA), entails the artist’s response to SOMEONE – or yourself. A memory book, a factual reckoning, the life story of a fictitious person.
For this collaborative mail art book project I have taken the theme of Someone, making this……. I was interested in exploring the ideas behind a piece of artwork made from a brass artillery shell (Trench Art) – who was the ‘someone’ who made it, reconfigured the brass into a corseted, engraved vase? Were they a soldier, Belgium blacksmith, a french metal worker? The book is an interpretation of these industrialised objects, the icons of early 2oth century warfare and attempt to understand the historical context through scrutinising the designs, making process and hand made marks.
Someone – Edition size 18
I was struck by the journey the brass shell may have taken – speculating on the lives of the women working in the munitions factory, smuggling notes to the front line soldiers, soldiers who in some cases were killed or injured due to sub-standard manufacturing of the very same shells. As pressure increased on the munitions factories, the standard of work on occasion dropped. These very same women may have journeyed out to Flanders Field, on pilgrimages, after the war to see where ‘Tommy’ took his last breath and bought, as keep-sakes and memory objects the very same industrialaised objects they made, reconfigured into pieces of art.
Someone made this…….
WW1 Trench & Folk Art 