Towards The Dunkirk Project

Once I’d got the idea of making an interactive installation around Thames to Dunkirk, with the sculpture as the centrepiece round which a River of Stories would flow, it occurred to me that a good way to start this installation off communally would be online, where people could easily see and respond to my work, interact with it, and contribute something of their own to a collective artwork that would thereby reflect a wider range of views, uncover some hidden voices, and perhaps give a platform for some unexpected or unconventional responses. I thought that it would be a very effective use of the blog format to actually make an artwork communally online by providing a primary experience and alongside it, a facilitating space for the response of other voices – making an artwork within the internet, rather than just showing one on it.

Also unusual would be the real-time unfolding of the River of Stories, telling fragments of accounts from Dunkirk daily as they happened seventy years ago, on the right days, running throughout the nine days of the event, 26th May to 3rd June, and then continuing to the aftermath, giving the reader an experience of re-enactment in real-time – even the weather the same. This proved extremely effective, keeping the suspense of the story as the days passed, allowing readers to engage with individuals and follow their progress throughout, and emphasising the sheer scale of the event, including its timescale. Some time-relevant contributions were sent on the right day – one person added a story (about her father realising it was his 22nd birthday on the beach at Dunkirk) on the anniversary of the day that happened, and another sent images of a postcard – ‘Safe and well in England’ – on the day it was written, seventy years ago.

Many people have followed the unfolding story daily, finding The Dunkirk Project through invitations (to my mailing list), adverts in the TLS and listings (including AN ‘what’s on’); I also set up a couple of conversations on message boards where people were likely to be interested. I was excited to find that visitor numbers, encouraging to begin with, increased, almost doubling daily throughout the nine days, and that many people contacted The Dunkirk Project either by email or through the message boards. And quite a few people added comments directly into the River of Stories using the comment boxes. So far, well over 700 have visited, responded or contributed over nine days (and I’m still counting), and the British Library has invited The Dunkirk Project on to its selected website archive for preservation.

Today, 4th June, is the last of the daily unfoldings of the story; entitled 4th June 1940 – Beyond Dunkirk, it recounts some stories from the last people to be evacuated, those left behind and some who were sent back in to France after the evacuation (what a thought), as well as some retrospective views. But the comments boxes on each of the daily pages are still open, and the stories are still coming in. I hope that people will continue to respond and discuss the issues raised – including whether we have a right to re-evaluate our national myths, and (if we do) how Dunkirk looks from here. I’ve been moved and heartened by the generosity of the contributions, and it seems clear that a physical installation of The Dunkirk Project where people can contribute to a River of Stories anonymously will achieve an enormous response – it seems to have tapped a rich seam, and gripped the imagination of so many.

Now I feel that I’ve read and written so much about Dunkirk, so many stories, that I want to take myself back to Thames to Dunkirk, my own artwork that came from this great source of individual accounts. I made that work to include all the stories, and for me, they are all contained in the tensions and correspondences between my original ‘four lines at once’: the river of little ships, the queues of men’s names on the beaches, the gripping story in BG Bonallack’s poem, and the introspective undercurrent revealed by Virginia Woolf’s text.

After Thames to Dunkirk was made and photographed, I felt that perhaps it would need to be exhibited in a context of related work, rather than alone. I made a group of 32 works called Watermark, including clay waterfalls, artist’s books, large stoneware vessels and artist’s films, exploring the river/life metaphor in poetry and positing Thames to Dunkirk as its ultimate edge. My work on Watermark has developed and deepened my understanding of the inter-relationship of the processes I’m engaged with to a very significant extent – all this work has come out of Thames to Dunkirk for me, which is very satisfactory, and I’m still engaged with the particular problems it presented, and ideas it raised to the surface. However, I made this group of work with a particular (big) gallery in mind, preparing for a specific proposal (not without encouragement, I must add), only to discover that at the moment when I had been advised to present, the gallery’s contemporary art programme was suspended due to lack of funding for a curator. Alternative arrangements for exhibition are still not finalised, but I have also developed the concept in another direction.

I have long had an interest in communal or interactive artworks or events. At the private view of my installation in the Southbank Centre Poetry Library in 2008, over fifty people completed an artwork with me on a glass lift wall. This event was very exciting, and generated a lot of interest among the participants, some of whom have told me that they will never forget it. But it was not without its difficulties: one contributor, a rather well-known artist who had come to the PV, said ‘How brave to let other people muck about with your work’ – and indeed, though most participants engaged wholeheartedly with the work, one person got a bit overexcited and defaced other people’s contributions with her lipstick – an unexpected and unwelcome intervention/sabotage. And though the resulting collective work Sea of Space was really interesting and curiously fragile/expressive, it was not wholly appreciated by some viewers, who thought it ‘messy’. Just what I’d hoped for, actually, but never mind. Anyway, this experience fed my taste for something a bit more anarchic and uncontrollable than we’re usually allowed to do, and also raised some questions for me about the relative values of participants’ contributions, and how we judge them.

All this led me towards developing the idea of an online interactive installation that would invite participation in making a River of Stories, layering fragments of individual stories from a huge collective event (Dunkirk 1940) in a inter-connected stream, where each contribution, whether ‘true story’, memory, anecdote or imaginative engagement would have an equal place, and where hidden, previously unheard voices would find a hearing, including those from outside the established archive, or the accepted or usual sources. I hoped to hear from women who had participated or whose lives had been affected by the war, from pacifists, from people with a different take, as well as from people whose memories hadn’t seemed important enough for telling outside the family, and thereby to gather a very vivid and detailed picture of the phenomenon, that would engage younger people who weren’t there in an imaginative response, and would perhaps prove enlightening about our inheritance of the continuing issues. This collective artwork would run alongside Thames to Dunkirk. I see now it was a very ambitious aim.

Next time I’ll talk about setting up The Dunkirk Project, how it’s going (which is astonishingly well, so far), and some of the issues it has raised.