Once I had the idea for the four lines at once, I could immediately see how Thames to Dunkirk could reference a number of other artworks by war artists. Richard Eurich’s extraordinary painting Dunkirk in the National Maritime Museum (Queen’s House) takes a bird’s-eye-view of the harbour, as if from an RAF plane, detailing many different fragments of the event in the turmoil of the composition, unified by the great sweep of smoke across everything, just as his Preparations for D-Day in the Imperial War Museum divides the canvas with smoke and the line of the coast. Laura Knight’s Balloon Site, Coventry 1943 unites the disparate elements in the composition with a kind of calligraphic choreography; Evelyn Dunbar’s Queue at the Fish Shop 1944 imbues a regular wartime activity for non-combatants with a monumental authority by the great linear sweep emphasising the length of the queue, combined with engaging personal detail and some great lettering. Eric Ravilious’ luminous RNAS Sick Bay, Dundee gives a very poignant relation of the particular to the universal, or at least common experience, and the huge John Singer Sargent canvas in the Imperial War Museum, Gassed 1919, tells many stories in at least four lines.
I wanted Thames to Dunkirk to bring into the picture stories that are as yet untold, or not part of the official history, by layering fragments of many people’s accounts together in a way that made them representative, while still individual. The photographs of the lines of men on the Dunkirk beaches in the IWM archive give a forceful impression of their individuality, as well as their graphic massing on the canvas of the beach, and I thought for some time about how to represent them with respect but without too much overwhelming detail: each individual is represented by a mark in sepia ink made with a wooden peg, an improvised tool that reflects their makeshift situation, while the lines of men queuing in the sea are made up of the letters of the names of men whose accounts I had read in the archive, lettered with the same tool. Each person is placed in the area where he was on the beach – the doctors by the hospital in the Chateau, for example. The grisaille watercolours of the bombed town and landscape, with the coils of smoke, came out of those contemporary photos, too.
The little ships’ stories, in the same way, I wanted to be inclusive, as well as representative. They are placed as nearly as possible where they came from on the Thames, or round the estuary or coast, and only begin (with Westerly) at the point where the river first becomes navigable. They are lettered with blue ink directly on to the incised and watercoloured map of the Thames.
On the progress of the installation: I’m very excited by the number of people who’ve already visited The Dunkirk Project (http://thedunkirkproject.wordpress.com); I’m running an advertisement for it in the TLS for the next three weeks, and I’m hoping that once the River of Stories begins (on Wednesday 26th) its daily unfolding of the tale, there will be lots of participation stimulated by the stories, contributing to the scope and diversity of the project.
Next time I’ll be talking about working with the large scale of the book and some of the problems of the making process, as well as how the installation’s going.
