ARTISTS TALKING

# 9 [2 November 2010]

I'm very pleased to be able to conclude this blog about the making process of my monumental artist's book Thames to Dunkirk, and my online interactive installation The Dunkirk Project, by reporting that the British Library has purchased Thames to Dunkirk, and selected The Dunkirk Project for their UK Web Archive, so that both will be permanently preserved within the British Library collection. 

# 8 [4 June 2010]

Once I'd got the idea of making an interactive installation around Thames to Dunkirk, with the sculpture as the centrepiece round which a River of Stories would flow, it occurred to me that a good way to start this installation off communally would be online, where people could easily see and respond to my work, interact with it, and contribute something of their own to a collective artwork that would thereby reflect a wider range of views, uncover some hidden voices, and perhaps give a platform for some unexpected or unconventional responses. I thought that it would be a very effective use of the blog format to actually make an artwork communally online by providing a primary experience and alongside it, a facilitating space for the response of other voices - making an artwork within the internet, rather than just showing one on it.

Also unusual would be the real-time unfolding of the River of Stories, telling fragments of accounts from Dunkirk daily as they happened seventy years ago, on the right days, running throughout the nine days of the event, 26th May to 3rd June, and then continuing to the aftermath, giving the reader an experience of re-enactment in real-time - even the weather the same. This proved extremely effective, keeping the suspense of the story as the days passed, allowing readers to engage with individuals and follow their progress throughout, and emphasising the sheer scale of the event, including its timescale. Some time-relevant contributions were sent on the right day - one person added a story (about her father realising it was his 22nd birthday on the beach at Dunkirk) on the anniversary of the day that happened, and another sent images of a postcard - 'Safe and well in England' - on the day it was written, seventy years ago. 

Many people have followed the unfolding story daily, finding The Dunkirk Project through invitations (to my mailing list), adverts in the TLS and listings (including AN 'what's on'); I also set up a couple of conversations on message boards where people were likely to be interested. I was excited to find that visitor numbers, encouraging to begin with, increased, almost doubling daily throughout the nine days, and that many people contacted The Dunkirk Project either by email or through the message boards. And quite a few people added comments directly into the River of Stories using the comment boxes. So far, well over 700 have visited, responded or contributed over nine days (and I'm still counting), and the British Library has invited The Dunkirk Project on to its selected website archive for preservation.

Today, 4th June, is the last of the daily unfoldings of the story; entitled 4th June 1940 - Beyond Dunkirk, it recounts some stories from the last people to be evacuated, those left behind and some who were sent back in to France after the evacuation (what a thought), as well as some retrospective views. But the comments boxes on each of the daily pages are still open, and the stories are still coming in. I hope that people will continue to respond and discuss the issues raised - including whether we have a right to re-evaluate our national myths, and (if we do) how Dunkirk looks from here. I've been moved and heartened by the generosity of the contributions, and it seems clear that a physical installation of The Dunkirk Project where people can contribute to a River of Stories anonymously will achieve an enormous response - it seems to have tapped a rich seam, and gripped the imagination of so many.

Now I feel that I've read and written so much about Dunkirk, so many stories, that I want to take myself back to Thames to Dunkirk, my own artwork that came from this great source of individual accounts. I made that work to include all the stories, and for me, they are all contained in the tensions and correspondences between my original 'four lines at once': the river of little ships, the queues of men's names on the beaches, the gripping story in BG Bonallack's poem, and the introspective undercurrent revealed by Virginia Woolf's text. 

# 7 [1 June 2010]

After Thames to Dunkirk was made and photographed, I felt that perhaps it would need to be exhibited in a context of related work, rather than alone. I made a group of 32 works called Watermark, including clay waterfalls, artist's books, large stoneware vessels and artist's films, exploring the river/life metaphor in poetry and positing Thames to Dunkirk as its ultimate edge. My work on Watermark has developed and deepened my understanding of the inter-relationship of the processes I'm engaged with to a very significant extent - all this work has come out of Thames to Dunkirk for me, which is very satisfactory, and I'm still engaged with the particular problems it presented, and ideas it raised to the surface. However, I made this group of work with a particular (big) gallery in mind, preparing for a specific proposal (not without encouragement, I must add), only to discover that at the moment when I had been advised to present, the gallery's contemporary art programme was suspended due to lack of funding for a curator. Alternative arrangements for exhibition are still not finalised, but I have also developed the concept in another direction.

I have long had an interest in communal or interactive artworks or events. At the private view of my installation in the Southbank Centre Poetry Library in 2008, over fifty people completed an artwork with me on a glass lift wall. This event was very exciting, and generated a lot of interest among the participants, some of whom have told me that they will never forget it. But it was not without its difficulties: one contributor, a rather well-known artist who had come to the PV, said 'How brave to let other people muck about with your work' - and indeed, though most participants engaged wholeheartedly with the work, one person got a bit overexcited and defaced other people's contributions with her lipstick - an unexpected and unwelcome intervention/sabotage. And though the resulting collective work Sea of Space was really interesting and curiously fragile/expressive, it was not wholly appreciated by some viewers, who thought it 'messy'. Just what I'd hoped for, actually, but never mind. Anyway, this experience fed my taste for something a bit more anarchic and uncontrollable than we're usually allowed to do, and also raised some questions for me about the relative values of participants' contributions, and how we judge them.

All this led me towards developing the idea of an online interactive installation that would invite participation in making a River of Stories, layering fragments of individual stories from a huge collective event (Dunkirk 1940) in a inter-connected stream, where each contribution, whether 'true story', memory, anecdote or imaginative engagement would have an equal place, and where hidden, previously unheard voices would find a hearing, including those from outside the established archive, or the accepted or usual sources. I hoped to hear from women who had participated or whose lives had been affected by the war, from pacifists, from people with a different take, as well as from people whose memories hadn't seemed important enough for telling outside the family, and thereby to gather a very vivid and detailed picture of the phenomenon, that would engage younger people who weren't there in an imaginative response, and would perhaps prove enlightening about our inheritance of the continuing issues. This collective artwork would run alongside Thames to Dunkirk. I see now it was a very ambitious aim.

Next time I'll talk about setting up The Dunkirk Project, how it's going (which is astonishingly well, so far), and some of the issues it has raised.

# 6 [28 May 2010]

To continue the tale of the making of Thames to Dunkirk, the 17m long freestanding paper sculpture on my online installation The Dunkirk Project: 

Once I had achieved my stack of pages, dried and fixed, my partner Frances and I started the construction. After we'd folded the pages again and arranged them in order, we used several litres of archive EVA (Shepherds Conservation adhesive) to make them into a concertina book - this was slightly easier said than done on this scale, and took us a few days, as I didn't want the paste to soak into the paper too much and blur the ink lettering, or worse still, make it print on the facing page. Once pasted together, the sections were pressed overnight in our patent Heath-Robinson-Large-Book-Press, constructed from all the largest books on our shelves, with the help of our sturdy dining table. Rather stressful, these few days, as I felt I already had so much work invested, and that anything going wrong could easily ruin the whole thing. But ultimately successful - after a week's pressing, the work-in-progress emerged as a book, with pages we could turn, all the right way up, and even in the right order. I could now assess the continuity, and was relieved to find that the line of the river joined up all the way along, and that the shore and sky lines on the Dunkirk side were continuous too. Hurrah, success. 

Now we had a very large handmade book on our dining table, I started to think it was rather vulnerable. The next few days were occupied in making a portfolio case for it (with sheets of Stockwell unbleached paper from Falkiners, lots more archive EVA, and some linen canvas facing for the spine and corners). This portfolio turned into quite a sculptural object itself, and of course in its turn required protection, so a second, waterproof cover was the next thing we made, with a huge plastic sheet and a lot of duck-tape. This has proved very useful in transporting the work - it's a two-person job to carry, and we put the handles in just the right place.

By the end of the month we were ready to think about photographing the work. We took a first series of page by page photos on the dining table (where else), but it's hard to get far enough back from something this big. The Rev. Kevin Scully, rector of the beautiful St Matthew's Church in Bow (rebuilt since it was bombed to a shell in the war, and now containing a fine collection of artworks) very kindly gave permission for us to photograph there, and even shifted all the pews. It was a great venue, with a shining wooden floor and huge clear windows, so I was able to see the 'freestanding sculpture' aspect of the work for the first time, and take a series of very usable photos. These are the photographs I've used in the page of my online installation devoted to Thames to Dunkirk, and I think they give a strong impression of the scale of the work, while still allowing the viewer to see the detail.

Next time I'll talk about developing ideas for the installation, and some other work associated with it.

On the progress of the installation: this is the third day of the daily stories, and numbers of visits to the site have doubled each day so far. I'm really pleased with the response - I was very much hoping for an imaginative engagement in visitors, as well as some more literal responses of memories and accounts, and so far, some really interesting questions have been raised, and some very pertinent points made.

# 5 [26 May 2010]

About the progress of  The Dunkirk Project: today 26th May is the first day of the nine-day River of Stories on my online installation at http://thedunkirkproject.wordpress.com. Each day I'm telling some of the stories, more or less as they happened 70 years ago. These stories are all from my research notebooks, and all went into the making of Thames to Dunkirk. I've already received some brilliant contributions from people telling family stories - I'm hoping to hear more from women who had to wait and worry, or indeed served themselves, or from people who feel strongly that it affected their lives in some way, or have views on the consequences and aftermath of Dunkirk. These will help us to re-evaluate the phenomenon, how a shared event becomes a national myth, and what we can learn from it. During the month I was making Thames to Dunkirk, 94 British soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. I think we can't afford to think of history as in the past; we have this huge collective experience and memory at our disposal, and we need to consider its significance, as well as preserve the archive. I've already had some interesting responses (either emailed to me at thedunkirkproject@pottersyard.co.uk, or via The Dunkirk Project on the BBC website history message board (at www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbhistory) or as comments direct to the River of Stories (at http://thedunkirkproject.wordpress.com). Please do contribute if you'd like to.

# 4 [26 May 2010]

Before I started work on Thames to Dunkirk I read a lot of material, including first-hand accounts and contemporary photographs in the Imperial War Museum archive, and every book I could find on the subject. I regard all this accumulation of material as part of the design process; its filtering and reduction becomes the essential transformation from concept to working first draft. My primary concern was that the form and scale of the work should reflect the surreal scale of the event, so I was thinking really big. I found the largest possible sheets of handmade khadi paper at Shepherds Falkiners shop on Southampton Row in London, and ordered 25 of them (allowing a spare, which became the endpapers). This stack of sheets (100cm x 140cm) just fitted into our car in three huge rolls and then took over our dining table for the next three months.
I realised that I would certainly not be following my usual practice of construction first, then decoration, which is second-nature to a studio potter. These vast pages had to be folded in half and then worked on one at a time on my adapted work-bench, and then when done, dried overnight and stored in a stack back on the dining table. I'm used to working in series so that I never have to wait for anything to dry (anathema), so I had to adjust my usual practice to work out a system for working on only one page at a time and completing the whole page in a day.
I started first thing every day with incising the river line and painting it in watercolour, mapping the Thames from source to sea. (The 'shifting north' I was obliged to use to accommodate the line onto the pages reflects the many volunteered small ships that didn't even have a compass to guide their Channel crossing.) I carefully measured the page edges to ensure the continuity of the line from page to page. This took all morning, so I had lunch while it dried. Next I lettered the small ships in ink on the river, then the 'type' text by brush upside-down at the top, and then the flowing Virginia Woolf text on the lower part of the page, with pens carved from Thames driftwood. Then I left the page to dry overnight.
For 12 days I worked on the first side (Thames side), completing a page a day. Once I'd reached the sea, I set off on the second side (Dunkirk side), first incising the river line backwards (as if it were incised through the page), which set the composition for each page, and determined the shapes of the smoke plumes and the lines of men in the sea. Then I drew and painted the grisaille watercolours of the coast, bombed town, landmarks and skyline, the views from 1940's photos taken from RAF planes - measuring each page again to ensure continuity. Then I painted the sand and sea. Then lunch while it dried. Then the 'type' text above (upside-down again), then the waiting men on the beach and their names queuing into the sea were marked with a peg-pen, and then I did the driftwood lettering in the sea. After all the pages were done, and safely in the stack on the dining table, I painted the front title cover page, and the back page, which links the Thames estuary with the Dunkirk beaches via a most unhelpful Admiralty Instruction directing the small ships across the channel ('by any... route with which you are familiar... proceed direct to Dunkirk roads'). This was lettered by brush in a font based on one of the original typed scraps of paper handed to the skippers, now in the IWM archive.
This sequence of work took 25 days (including 1 day off) - and I loved every second of it. I was on a roll, didn't answer the phone, wash up or think about anything else. My partner looked after me throughout - she was only writing a book at the time. We had a wonderful time. Next time I'll talk about the book construction, and I'll add another post later today about the progress of my online installation.

# 3 [24 May 2010]

Once I had the idea for the four lines at once, I could immediately see how Thames to Dunkirk could reference a number of other artworks by war artists. Richard Eurich's extraordinary painting Dunkirk in the National Maritime Museum (Queen's House) takes a bird's-eye-view of the harbour, as if from an RAF plane, detailing many different fragments of the event in the turmoil of the composition, unified by the great sweep of smoke across everything, just as his Preparations for D-Day in the Imperial War Museum divides the canvas with smoke and the line of the coast. Laura Knight's Balloon Site, Coventry 1943 unites the disparate elements in the composition with a kind of calligraphic choreography; Evelyn Dunbar's Queue at the Fish Shop 1944 imbues a regular wartime activity for non-combatants with a monumental authority by the great linear sweep emphasising the length of the queue, combined with engaging personal detail and some great lettering. Eric Ravilious' luminous RNAS Sick Bay, Dundee gives a very poignant relation of the particular to the universal, or at least common experience, and the huge John Singer Sargent canvas in the Imperial War Museum, Gassed 1919, tells many stories in at least four lines.

I wanted Thames to Dunkirk to bring into the picture stories that are as yet untold, or not part of the official history, by layering fragments of many people's accounts together in a way that made them representative, while still individual. The photographs of the lines of men on the Dunkirk beaches in the IWM archive give a forceful impression of their individuality, as well as their graphic massing on the canvas of the beach, and I thought for some time about how to represent them with respect but without too much overwhelming detail: each individual is represented by a mark in sepia ink made with a wooden peg, an improvised tool that reflects their makeshift situation, while the lines of men queuing in the sea are made up of the letters of the names of men whose accounts I had read in the archive, lettered with the same tool. Each person is placed in the area where he was on the beach - the doctors by the hospital in the Chateau, for example. The grisaille watercolours of the bombed town and landscape, with the coils of smoke, came out of those contemporary photos, too.

The little ships' stories, in the same way, I wanted to be inclusive, as well as representative. They are placed as nearly as possible where they came from on the Thames, or round the estuary or coast, and only begin (with Westerly) at the point where the river first becomes navigable. They are lettered with blue ink directly on to the incised and watercoloured map of the Thames.

On the progress of the installation: I'm very excited by the number of people who've already visited The Dunkirk Project (http://thedunkirkproject.wordpress.com); I'm running an advertisement for it in the TLS for the next three weeks, and I'm hoping that once the River of Stories begins (on Wednesday 26th) its daily unfolding of the tale, there will be lots of participation stimulated by the stories, contributing to the scope and diversity of the project.
Next time I'll be talking about working with the large scale of the book and some of the problems of the making process, as well as how the installation's going.

# 2 [19 May 2010]

Finding the form that would reflect the scale of the event, and the complexity of the story, somehow weaving the multitude of voices into a readable narrative sequence and giving that sequence a physical shape - these were the problems that obsessed me at the start of this project. Making Thames to Dunkirk began, as all my work does, with finding the right text. Then I could see what form the work would take.

Since my installation in the Southbank Centre's Poetry Library in 2008, I've been making a lot of artist's books - or book art, anyway, artworks in the form of books, but one-off, unique signed objects, each with its own purpose and integrity, though related in the sequence of works. So the idea of a book was already there - but it would clearly have to be a huge one. And how to draw so many stories together, including the hidden voices, the otherwise untold, without losing the integrity of the work? Virginia Woolf again gave me the idea: in a letter to Stephen Spender, she wrote:

'I should like to write four lines at a time, describing the same feeling, as a musician does; because it always seems to me that things are going on at so many different levels simultaneously.'

I decided to make the work as a concertina book through which four lines of meaning could flow simultaneously, coming in and out of focus as the sequence progressed, but coexisting in a parity of importance throughout. This would combine the linear sequence of the narrative flow with a more complex interweaving of the meanings.

The four lines I decided on were 1) An eye-witness account in a man's voice, lettered in a font I designed from a 1940 tyewritten letter (this text is Dunkirk by BG Bonallack); 2) A more allusive contemplative considered response in a woman's voice, lettered with a driftwood pen (this text is by Virginia Woolf, from The Waves); 3) A watercolour river of boats, representing not only the rescuers but all non-combatants who were/are inevitably nevertheless involved; and 4) the long strand of Dunkirk beaches and town in watercolour, with the names of some who were there representing all 300,000.

Once I had this form to work with, the composition was a matter of page-by-page layout, working with a map of the Thames for the river, 1940's photographs of Dunkirk from the air for the landscapes, and photos of the queuing troops for the compositions on the beaches. I made a small (!) version to get everything ready, which turned out to be over 5m long when opened out, so I knew it was going to be a big job. Next time I'll write about some of the problems I encountered and what I did about them.

On the progress of the installation, I'm very excited to see that a lot of people have already visited The Dunkirk Project at http://thedunkirkproject.wordpress.com - I hope they'll be coming back for the story unfolding daily on 26th May to 3rd June. I'm inviting contributions, and I'm hoping to hear alternative views from women, non-combatants, pacifists and other dissenters. Any contribution, however small, increases the scope.

# 1 [17 May 2010]

The nine days from May 26th to June 3rd see the 70th anniversary of a legendary wartime event, the evacuation of more than 300,000 British and French troops who had retreated to the beaches at Dunkirk and were under heavy bombardment, by a makeshift armada of boats and ships, many of them crewed by volunteers. Many artworks have been made to commemorate and celebrate this event, including The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico and Noel Coward's In Which We Serve - my own imagination was first hooked by reading a very entertaining account in Virginia Woolf's diary about a chap she knew who'd managed to struggle home still clutching a couple of smuggled watches - and in the course of my research I came across an amazing variety of experiences recorded within this shared event, from extremes of selfless heroism to sheer rage. Much of my work over the last few years has been concerned with ideas of conflict, and the tensions between individuality and duty - Dunkirk became for me an image of this duality, where defeat was turned to miracle and the certainty of disaster became a celebrated humanitarian triumph, 'the greatest thing this nation has ever done' (John Masefield).

Once hooked on the image, I needed to find a form appropriate to the scale of the event, that would also reflect the complexity of the response and the issues. I wanted some way of including the hidden voices and alternative views among the official history, and perhaps to discover and reveal more stories that haven't been heard. I'll be talking next time about the evolution of my huge paper sculpture, Thames to Dunkirk. To see it in full, and for more of the amazing Dunkirk story, please visit my online interactive installation The Dunkirk Project at http://thedunkirkproject.wordpress.com where the river of stories will be unfolding daily from 26th May to 3rd June. I'm very much hoping that many people will want to contribute, with memories, stories or responses - and I'll be recording the progress of the installation on this blog as it goes along.