Clay and commemoration: materializing the somatic experience of warfare through ceramic practice

摘要

During my doctoral research at Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens, I worked with 11 Wearside-born soldiers from Third Battalion, The Rifles (3 Rifles) to make ceramic artworks which responded to their experience of fighting in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, during Operation Herrick 11 (October 2009-April 2010; see McHugh 2013, 2015). This engagement was inspired by the Museum's collection of nineteenth-century Sunderland lustreware pottery, some of which commemorates past military campaigns and naval battles. While the historical pottery tends towards jingoism, I wanted to avoid this by creating a body of work which addressed the soldiers' embodied experience of warfare rather than grand narratives of heroism.