Thursday 7 August 2014

299. THE BLOOD SWEPT SEAS AND LANDS OF RED by PAUL CUMMINS


THE TOWER OF LONDON
THE BLOOD SWEPT SEAS AND LANDS OF RED by PAUL CUMMINS


















   I first saw this art work yesterday on BBC TV. This morning  I walked to the Tower of London and joined the crowds .
 
Poppies pour out from the side of the building, a castle with 1,000 years of (often violent) history. The scarlet looks like a gaping. bleeding wound. Already over 120,000 poppies  have been placed there in a setting designed by Tom Piper. By the time Armistice Day comes round in November,  888,246 poppies will have been 'planted', one for each British and Colonial death in the First World War (1914-1919).

The indelible image of 'blood' pouring from a gash shocked me because as a student who once studied  history I read a lot about wars. I saw them  primarily as a battle between conflicting ideas and claims, which ended up with new national boundaries and rulers. There must have been  statistics about fatalities, but I realise now I hardly noticed.

The poppies are ceramic and made in the Derby workshop of the artist Paul Cummins. The process uses as little machinery as possible: blocks of clay are sliced and stamped as large and small petals before being hand-crafted. The link between the poppy and death is said to have been influenced by a poem written on the Front Line and published in 1919 by the Canadian poet, physician and soldier, John McCrae. One account of how it came to be written is to be found in the Arlington Cemetery website below:
In Flanders field the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place:and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
                                       Scarce heard amid the guns below                                        

The work's title come from  a living will which Paul Cummins found in Derbyshire two years ago. One of its strengths is to remind us that although each death is an individual tragedy, the dead from all nations can also be remembered together, each one an equal victim of this international tragedy.

 
More recently - 100 years ago to be exact - the Tower of London was the place where hundreds and hundreds of Londoners lined up inside the perimeter, recruited or volunteering in the patriotic fervour which swept the land. Many of then would not come back..
www.tompiperdesign.co.uk
www.hrp.org.uk/TowerOfLondon/
www.arlingtoncemetery.net/flanders.htm






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