Event details

Venue - Powell Lower Foyer Gallery, North Holmes Road, Canterbury. To mark the centenary of WWI's end, this challenging exhibition draws on the visualisation of actual experience, on medical documentation of injuries sustained and the subsequent memorialisation of warfare. . It will include A Tommy's Life in the Trenches by WWI illustrator Fergus Mackain, A Model War by Graham Goldwater and Karen Shepherdson's Arts Council funded Aftermath I & II. The exhibition provides insight into contemporary creative practice-based research, exploring themes of human ruin, (re)membering and remembrance. In doing so, the exhibition specifically examines ‘ruination’ relating to the human form - a form all too vulnerable to mechanical warfare. This challenging exhibition explores how physical vulnerabilities might be translated forcefully, yet simultaneously tenderly, through found objects and images of the damaged human face. As Dr Sally Minogue commented: “the damaged face was one of the most difficult disfigurements for a surviving combatant to bear because of the public response of disgust and rejection, as well as the sufferer’s own deep loss of confidence and sense of identity. In facing [such] photographs we take on a responsibility to face up to what modern warfare means”.