THE FLOWERS OF OUR CONFLICTS (2014-2023)
In 2014, I made the first of many rail journeys to an artists’ residency in the small mountain town of Atina, near Monte Cassino in the Comino Valley. Over two weeks, I worked with the local archivist librarian (speaking in French as it was the language we both shared) to research stories of the allied bombing of the Comino Valley and the Battle of Monte Cassino in 1942. The people of the valley suffered much hardship following the bombing. In Atina, families whose homes had been destroyed, had nowhere to sleep but the cemetery of St. Marco. In the library’s collection, I found photographs of children orphaned by the bombing and made anthoype prints of them with geranium petals dead-headed from planters in the town square (rebuilt after the bombing). For the residency exhibition, I made an installation that used the anthotype process as a metaphor - seven marble slabs, on each, carefully arranged, a baby’s bib, that I’d made by hand from local cotton lawn and lace. The bibs had been used to strain geranium emulsion and each tile offered up a bib that was carefully arranged and slightly more untwisted than the one before, the last tile revealing that what appeared to be a display of exotic flowers unfolding their petals, were actually baby’s bibs stained the colour of blood-red geraniums. At the beginning of the row was the mortar and pestle I use to crush petals in the making of anthotype emulsions, at the end was a votive candle encased in Virgin-Mary decorated plastic, like the ones found on almost every grave in the cemetery of St. Marco. Earlier this year, I revisited the project and made Chlorophyll prints of the photos of orphaned children, on nasturtium leaves that had been partially destroyed by insects. This work will be featured in KIN an anthology of writing and art by women of Romany heritage, to be published in September 2024.