Mine the Mountain
This series of works is primarily concerned with researches into my family history set against the wider context of further research into the anonymous individual in history and, subsequently history itself.
Mine the Mountain 2
Continuing and expanding on the themes of the first exhibition (the past, the present, family heritage, memory and the anonymous individual in history) this collection of work once again draws on my experiences at sites of historic trauma: Auschwitz- Birkenau, Belzec and Majdanek; Ypres and Verdun. It also begins to explore the notion of both the Dark Tourist (tourists who visit sites of trauma) and the idea of a tourism of the self, particularly with regards to family heritage.
History is not what happened yesterday, a hundred years ago or more. It isn’t one-way traffic from what was to what is now. It’s an encounter; a dialogue between the past and the present, at a threshold between two worlds. By understanding our own world when meeting the world of the past; by observing relics and residues with our imaginations, so we get a different kind of history, and through my work, I look for ways to make these encounters and ‘conversations’ as vivid and veracious as possible; encouraging people to look at the past through the prism of their own lives; after all, the greater part of our lives are as much a part of the same past as those we read of in history books.
Mine the Mountain 1
The journey into my own past and that of my ancestors began following a visit to Poland in October 2006, during which time I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. There are, as far as I’m aware, no familial connections with the camp or indeed with the Holocaust, and yet, after visiting Auschwitz and other camps, such as Majdanek, Belzec and Natzweiler-Struthof, I began to search for my own heritage – a search which has enabled me, in some small way, to resolve what I can only describe as my confrontation with History at the site of the infamous death camp.
One of the many difficulties facing the visitor at Auschwitz-Birkenau, apart from the sheer, overwhelming, tangible horror of the place (its physical presence, the documentary evidence and the exhibits of possessions and other human artefacts) is the enormous numbers with which one is confronted. How can one possibly imagine 1.1 million dead? How can one, amongst that mountain of disappeared people, find the individual to whom one might, in some small way, relate? After all, with the exception of a relative few who wrote about their experiences (Anne Frank, Primo Levi, Filip Muller and so on) all that remains of millions of people are mountains of shoes, mountains of ash, lists of names, or maybe nothing at all.
So 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 I began to mine my own past; the mountain of anonymous people I call my ancestors.