Made from photographs taken at the war cemetery at Tilly-Sur-Seulles in Normandy. I was moved not only by the graves and the parents' heartbroken inscriptions, but by the realisation that we were looking at the graves of children sent to kill each other.
I imagined the ground being populated by the occupants, larking around, smoking, taking the piss out of their solemn visitors, as they always did and as they always will.
This poem by Keith Douglas, How To Kill is clinically realistic about the technicalities of slaughter: the image of an enemy soldier caught in a the sights, whose distant physical presence is now a memory, but one loaded with retrospective detail; a child who had a mother waiting for him at home, but who would never return.
Douglas himself was killed during the Normandy invasion. He was 24.
How To Kill
Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.
Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears
and look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.
The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.
These images are printed on heavy 315gsm etching paper.
They are a limited edition of 100.
Signed and numbered by the artist.
Frame not supplied.