Category: DFA

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Steph Harrison

Steph Harrison

My response was in reaction to the German Soldier’s recollection of that fateful day 1st July 1916. I created a book to show his testimony of how that day unfolded. He described the peacefulness of a beautiful early morning, the piercing summer blue sky, the sound of the leaves and bird song amongst the trees in Thiepval woods.

In glaring contrast the memory of the attack; mud, barbed wire, bodies in green spread over the land, artillery bombardment and carnage, the barren landscape, trees desecrated; 19,240 leaves turned to brown. The footage from home portrayed a different war, the wife of a soldier experienced emotional suffering and grief on receiving that letter. They had no repatriation of their loved ones, a white grave in a foreign land, or disappeared to the earth, a 66 – letter epitaph.

My work was placed in a box, in reference to the books of names of the fallen that are held in the walls at the Thiepval Memorial in France.

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Merve Jones

With Heart and Hand

Merve Jones

A triptych in response to an interview of a WW1 machine gunner with the Ulster Division at the Battle of the Somme, July 1916. How he spoke with some pride in the understanding of what made a good machine gunner – as a mechanic would of grasping the principles of what makes an engine run well. Of his place within the infantry; of the team of men and equipment needed to transport the gun and ammunition; of how to avoid jamming the weapon or wearing out barrels prematurely; of how to use it most efficiently.

My different outlook on war made me see the whole exercise in terms of each side being involved in the delivery of lead into fellow humans. Their training, equipment and deployment all aiming to deliver more death to their opposite numbers than could be delivered to them.

They were ordinary men remade into a lethal Parcel Force.

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Joanne Fitzpatrick

With Heart and Hand

Joanne Fitzpatrick

The work, Dark Echo, was produced as a response to the film footage viewed and inspiration was taken from the conversations across all ten clips.

The process of recording the information from the footage was initially completed in written note form and for the last 6 clips the recording changed to drawing – The sketches produced encapsulated a visceral response to the conversations – listening helped to visualise the landscape, the darkness in the trenches, the smells and the fear that was vocalised throughout the footage. These feelings were then expressed through mark making, culminating in a series of mixed media drawings. Each drawing was unintentionally linked by a common theme. This process then enabled me to produce a series of mixed media screen prints, depicting desolate, barren landscapes in an abstract and expressive way. 

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Pen Jones

With Heart and Hand

Pen Jones

In the nineteen sixty six anniversary of the Somme battle, interviews were mainly of Ulster veterans from the First World War. The lack of empathy shown by the interviewer in his questioning was stark.

Behind the mask of detailed facts asked of these people lie tragic stories: how did they come to terms with what happened to them and how did that affect the rest of their lives?

One women (unnamed) was given a small chance to speak of her grief. She still retained a sense of profound bewilderment as to what had happened to her husband, even after forty years. She couldn’t understand the speed with which he had gone from a man full of health as he waved her goodbye, to a corpse. The suggestion was that he had died of some kind disease very soon after he left. It is reckoned that tens of thousands died at the front from disease alone.

As the woman spoke of the postman delivering the stark letter telling of her husband’s sudden death, I imagined the horror of that moment for her and her children, and how she would now manage to keep herself and her children alive.
This must have been the lot of many women who suffered and struggled as she did. Their pain lasted a lifetime too.

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Elizabeth Donaldson

With Wild and Heart

Elizabeth Donaldson

Towards a Yellow Sky is a multi-layered screen print incorporating expressive mark-making, digital manipulation techniques, abstract code and conceptualised colour fields.  

A subject never previously explored by the artist. This uniquely immersive project presented the opportunity to be part of a shared creative response among peer group printmakers from Seacourt Print Workshop.

Personal accounts of war, as told by those who experienced it first-hand, were deconstructed and reimagined in two dimensions, with sensitivity and respect. 

“I was mindful that what I wanted to represent was a visceral response to the stories told, a sensation and feeling.

The yellow sky was mentioned in one of the stories and I was very moved by the image that conjured in my mind – the idea of going towards a yellow sky – underpinned by the brutality of war and men going towards their death.  

I translated the phrase “towards and yellow sky” into morse code and used digital manipulation techniques to abstract and obscure the code. These were exposed to a screen and printed in multiple layers. The effects resemble communication and code on a number of levels, newsprint, DNA, braille, and I liked that they were combined into a visual language that would be part of the vertical landscape.” 

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Rosie Ennis

With Heart and Hand

Rosy Ennis

Firestorm is a collagraph print and I made this a response to images in The North and South Irish at the Front, Part 1

Scorched Earth is a collagraph print and The North and South Irish at the Front, Part 2, is the film clip that moved me to create this.

Trench Warfare was a collagraph print I made as a response to the soldier’s explanation of “going over the top”. The film clip was from With Heart and Hand: Battle of the Somme

Fire in the sky is a collagraph print that I created as a response to images in The North and South Irish at the Front, Part 1