Re-creating a landscape made from ultimate destruction. THE EGG PIECE

In Verdun, France the land is still pockmarked with artillery craters from WWI, enough so that it looks other-worldly. This is reinforced by the fact that nature has grown over the craters, disguising the artificial reason for them, but not completely.

The British painter Paul Nash expresses this in his painting of NoMansLand, 'We Are Making A New World' (1918).

Walking around this battlefield felt fragile, as if the Earth wasn't completely healed. Malformed.

***

Military life makes you feel this way magnified. Trepidation. Every situation volatile, echoes of explosions as well as anticipation of the next one.  On the constant watch of something else.

I am investigating how this constant has affected home life, and family.
To re-create a ground that is constantly inconstant, fragile, unpredictable.

Using eggs (only shells, which are mostly whole, although some fractured) and wrapping them in the protective skin of intestine. They will cover the ground.

An other-worldly landscape
Fragile
protected but unpredictable



Visually I am working with the static movement of eggs.  Balanced, but how they are arranged will represent the kind of frozen undulation of the crater reformed ground at Verdun. The foreboding anxiety of what happened, or what could happen.... stuck in unhealed memory.