Un Souvenir | 2013
Le Bouôn Dgieu donne les provisions, et l'Dgiâblye envyie les couqes.
The good Lord provides, the Devil takes away.
(Jèrriais proverb)
This work came together spontaneously - I use my family albums and stories for the source material for a lot of my projects, and I had been holding on to a family postcard portrait of my paternal great-grandmother, my grandmother and her siblings since my grandmother passed away. The fold creases and worn edges of the postcard showed its age, when you read the inscriptions on the back, the portrait became even more emotionally charged.
My French-born paternal great-grandfather was conscripted into the French army during WW1, and stationed near Angers. The photos in this piece which accompanying the postcard were taken during a trip through France in 2012. In one tiny village called Dompierre-les-Eglises, I took a walk through the local cemetary across from our campsite and was struck by how every grave was for a fallen WW1 soldier. I'm young enough to take peace for granted, and I hadn't ever considered how enormous the loss of life was during WW1. I remembered the postcard and suddenly felt the weight of this history touch me personally.
The second thing that struck me were the grave ornaments - rather than real and artificial flowers, the graves were adorned with ceramic and porcelain 'souvenirs' - plaques, wreaths, camelias and chrysathemums of clay. I had never seen this before and found the permanance of the tributes beautiful - I liked how the coloured glazes kept their shine, and their solidity seemed to be more appropriate for graveside tributes than flowers which wither and fade.
The word 'Souvenir' was inscribed on a lot of the ceramic tributes; in French this means memory, so perhaps we can think of it in this situation to mean 'in remembrance'. I recalled seeing 'Carte de Souvenir' being printed on the back of postcard portraits from the turn of the 19th century, and liked that memory became another link between the postcard portrait and the ceramic tributes. In her book, "On longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection" (1984) Susan Stewart writes: 'We do not need or desire souvenirs of events that are repeatable. Rather we need and desire souvenirs... of events whose materiality has escaped us, events that thereby exist only through the invention of narrative' (p135).
When these Souvenirs came together - my family portrait postcard and the ceramic tributes from Dompierre, I found that this 'invention of narrative' gave them both a materiality and a fullness that went beyond personal experience, and began to say something about a wider European social history instead.