THE BLOOD SWEPT LANDS AND SEAS OF RED:THE TOWER OF LONDON

James did such a wonderful job with his last guest post that I couldn't help but invite him back again. His approach to art is a lot more historical than mine has ever been, and so I always appreciate getting to hear his take. It never fails to make me consider art from a new perspective and to allow me to find something unexpected. Here, where I would've probably gotten call caught up with the tradition of public sculpture and installation art, he's really captured emotion in a wonderful way.
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In Flanders fields the poppies blow

      Between the crosses, row on row,

   That mark our place; and in the sky

   The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

   Loved and were loved, and now we lie

         In Flanders fields

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

   The torch; be yours to hold it high.

   If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

         In Flanders fields.

Lt Colonel John McCrae, an army doctor in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, wrote this poem during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, a battle best known for the first deployment by the German army of poison gas.  This poem is popularly thought to be the inspiration behind the adoption of the poppy as the symbol of remembrance, first of the Great War and then subsequently of all fallen soldiers.

While they can be controversial in some places, most notably amongst Irish nationalists, the wearing of a red or white poppy in the weeks leading up to Remembrance Sunday in November is an incredibly potent symbol of reflection, mourning and tribute.  Every year over 40 million poppies are made and sold and they become a ubiquitous sight on the streets and on television across the UK as well as in many Commonwealth countries.  They are a display of collective remembrance; a symbol of gratitude for all those who died fighting for their country.

This year, as part of a huge number of activities commemorating the outbreak of the First World War, ceramic artist Paul Cummins has created an installation called ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’.  Based in the moat of the Tower of London, he began a project to plant one ceramic poppy for every British military fatality.  That is a total of 888,246.

The project is a community one. Artists and volunteers made the poppies in an industrial estate in Derby, and the poppies are placed in the moat by volunteers who signed up online.  On Saturday 4^th October, one of those people was me.  If you want to find out more about the project and how the poppies are made watch the video below. 

What I love about this project is the community aspect of it.  The central reason why the poppy appeal works is that it is an exercise in collective reflection.  There is no family in the country that did not have at least one member serve in the world wars.  Mine was very lucky in that none of them died, but there are millions more that weren't so lucky.  These are people, 100 years on from the conflict giving up their time to commemorate a war that no one alive fought in and to remember those that died.  It is quite extraordinary and deeply moving.

Just a few of the hundred or so volunteers working the day I was there.

Something I would like to highlight from the film above is that each poppy is made by hand. They are molded by volunteer artists, spray-painted in London and then we volunteers did the final assembly. While others did the actually planting, some of the volunteers worked on a sort of assembly line, attaching the separate pieces. We would then rotate so that the other group would plant while the other assembled.

The handmade nature of the poppies for me is absolutely vital to the whole enterprise.  It makes each poppy unique because no two will quite look the same - just as though every soldier was dressed in the same uniforms, they were all unique.  They will be planted in slightly different ways because of the number of people that are involved and each one has the same value when they get sold on at the end, just as each of their lives were equally precious.

Unique but together as one

The main reason that I wanted to volunteer for this was a bit of selfish one.  Members of the public can only see this installation from above the moat on the walkways whereas volunteers actually get to go down and get up close.  I think it’s a crying shame that they won’t be opening up the moat, though I do understand why that may not be the best idea.  However, getting down and close to them gives a very different perspective to the one from up above.  From on high you can very easily appreciate the scale of the project and of the war that it commemorates - but from my position you can better get a sense of the individual.  You can better see the differences between the poppies; the lack of absolute uniformity in the sea of red and black.

Yet as I said, this installation is fantastically successful at getting across the idea of size.  As I wrote in my piece on the ‘First World War Galleries’in the Imperial War Museum, one of the hardest things when talking about the casualties of the Great War is getting your head around the sheer scale of it.  As noted humanitarian and sane person Josef Stalin probably didn’t actually say “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”  You somehow need to take the concept of one death, an individual tragedy for a few people and then multiply that by 888,246. 

The way that this installation does that is take the poppy, something that almost all of us wear every year – a familiar symbol of mourning – and show us nearly a million of them.  It shows us that number in a physical way, rather than purely a number on a page, or a line in a speech.  888,246 people personified in red clay.  Below is a film I took showing all the poppies that we had planted so far.

That’s a lot right?  Well that’s only about half a million. There are still 2/5 of the poppies left to plant.  Look at how long it took me to walk around it from start to finish.  There is a point from above the moat where you can stand, and from 10 o’clock to 2 o’clock, all you can see is a sea of red below the mediaeval ramparts.  And that is still not all of them. 

The idea of scale is vitally important in this installation.  I was not wearing a poppy at the time of my volunteering because they appeal has not yet started, but whilst I was standing in amongst these poppies I thought about that piece of paper and plastic that I wear every year.  That thing on my lapel translates to one of their larger ceramic cousins embedded in that moat.  And the one next to it, and the over 800,000 either side.  

The connection to that symbol on your chest, and the sea of red in front of your eyes really brings home that idea of individual suffering multiplied by 888,246.  It is truly moving and totally free to see but will be dismantled starting from 12^th November, so make sure that you go and see it while you can.

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I hope you all enjoyed! It won't be too long before you have me back, but in the meantime be sure to go have a look at James' blog, where he writes about books. You'll even see a post by yours truly.