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.
