Shrine and Distant Dreams: Two installations responding to the “memorialisation of conflict” shown as part of the ACE funded national exhibition, “The Art of Remembering”
- Submitting institution
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The University of Bolton
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 0049_32_REF2_PL_01
- Type
- L - Artefact
- Location
- Penrith
- Open access status
- -
- Month of production
- August
- Year of production
- 2014
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Shrine and Distant Dreams were two interrelated artworks selected from a national call for artists to respond to the events of World War I.
Contextual information: The installation Shrine is a reconstructed drawing room shrine to a fallen soldier in the home of a bereaved family. Based on research into the memory-traces and material remains of domestic life in the wake of the First World War, the work investigates the intersection of military and domestic life: the overlap of intensely personal grief and global militarism.
Families of the military dead were presented with Memorial Plaques from the King which were also known as ''Dead Man's Pennies'' - copper memorial discs mass-produced in the very same factories as their weapons. Sourcing, selecting and staging artefacts such as photographs, letters home, and cartridge cases, Shrine uses material traces of the life and death of Frederick Finucane, a fifteen-year old volunteer soldier, as a doorway into the domestic aftermath of mechanised warfare.
Distant Dreams develops this insight into the mechanisms of memorialisation. Inspired by the mass-production of paper poppies and the vast European cemeteries for the war dead, the installation is housed in a structure resembling a defensive fortification - a plain black box with one viewing slit. Looking in, the viewer sees a red-lit and geometrically precise diorama of graves, surrounded by mirrors which extend the repetition to infinity. The Finucane shrine is chillingly repeated.
The research unites the specificity and magnitude of personal loss by highlighting the complicity of processes of commemoration with mass production.
The works were presented as part of the exhibition “The Art of Remembering” sponsored by The Arts Council England, 20th September - 23rd November 2014 at the Rheged Gallery, Penrith, The Dock Museum, Barrow 29th January - 19th April 2015 and The Beacon Museum, Whitehaven.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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