The Burned-Over Country
2017-2024
Group exhibition, One-Minute Space, Athens (2024) // Group exhibition, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin (2024)
The Burned-Over Country addresses post-traumatic stress disorder in British Armed Forces veterans as well as the concept of intergenerational trauma. With international conflicts on the rise, battle-related deaths at a 30-year high and forcibly displaced persons estimated at 108 million, there is a significant focus on how the horrors of war affect civilian populations – but less on the soldiers responsible for committing these acts. Showing compassion for the latter without condoning their actions or the decisions that led them to a career in the armed forces is a vital balancing act that prompts further exploration of how such minds are rendered fragile and isolated by PTSD and whether society has a duty to help them.
There are approximately 6,000 homeless veterans on the streets of the United Kingdom. Many more suffer from substance abuse, and tens of thousands are believed to have undiagnosed PTSD. The author’s father is one such veteran left to deal with his personal experiences of war alone – in a country that conveniently overlooks much of its imperialist past, yet fetishises its veneration of service men and women in the form of the Poppy Appeal, Remembrance Day, ‘Lest We Forget’ and so on. The irony is that the British public takes great pains to remember the fallen while remaining ignorant of the fact that the living are falling day after day.
This trauma is not localised within the veteran alone. It becomes a shared burden carried by the collective, even more so when – as in the author’s case – soldiering is a family trade practised across multiple generations. This visual work therefore looks backwards in order to identify the seeds of this trauma, planted long before the veteran’s birth, and illustrates how its roots radiate out, from grandfather to father to son, locking all three into a chronology of complicity.
A SELECTION FROM THE BOOK (FORTHCOMING)
