Exile and Return – A group exhibition commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Bailiwick of Guernsey from Nazi occupation. Part 3. Landscape painting, war and displacement.

While making the landscape paintings for the Exile and Return exhibition, once again I returned to the question of why landscape painting is the genre of painting that I have always been drawn to make. It started as a child moving from felt-tipped animals and plants, to the island coastline and meadows. The illustrative work of art foundation course progressed into thinking about landscape in a more conceptual way at art college when landscape and painting itself was deeply unfashionable. More recently, since taking up painting again during the initial Covid lockdown, landscape seemed the most natural place to resume that seductive relationship with the materiality of paint. Drawing outside was also an escape from the confines of my home, when isolating alone often felt stifling and claustrophobic.

Representing the natural world, both grounds me and takes me to other imagined worlds. The sense of place that a location holds seems tied so essentially to our identity and history. It rekindles the sense of awe in the beauty and mystery of nature that children possess - the enchantment of a shiny stag beetle’s iridescence, or the tendrils of a sea anemone opening and closing as the tide washes across. For some reason, this fascination often seems to dissipate when the thrill of the social world, music and fashion sparks into being in teenage years.

My personal internalised landscape was formulated long before spoken language: dark verdant valleys overhung with tunnelling trees lining the steep hill to the beach below my home; giant rhubarb plants like pink stemmed fairy trees trailing the dank banks of the stream; and whispering cliffsides sheer above the bay, holding the secrets of the millennia close. I vividly remember the scent of bruised stinking onion leaves, eucalyptus pods and the sharp ozone tang of drying vraic on the pebbly shelves above the shoreline; colours and smell almost interchangeable in my four-year-old mind.

Making work that depicts a place or space is meaningful because the connective tissue binding it together draws together narratives, folklore, rituals and ways of life that are centred deep in the individual and collective memory and the psyche. Locally, the smugglers’ pathways zigzagging between fields, used by privateers; Tchîco, the dog of the dead, haunting the Boundary-stone of the Saumarez at St Martin; and the backbreaking labour of the men and women who toiled in greenhouses, raised crab pots and herded their cows slowly along the narrow lanes are all intrinsically bound to my own internalised landscape.

Landscape painting is a depository for emotions and states of being - love and desire, loss and remembrance, belonging and otherness. The process of making landscape work allows us to examine our societies in various ways across multiple disciplines such as the natural sciences, economics and politics, and through the discourse of painting, visual art and the humanities. It also allows us to consider humankind’s impact on the land and the wider ecology - so vital at this time of climate emergency.

Using landscape as a way to consider the impact of warfare and displacement is a part of this discourse. While war and unrest is never absent in the world, it seems particularly unstable at the moment, with the atrocities occurring in Gaza, Ukraine and the ethnic tensions, chronic insecurity, and worsening humanitarian crises in many other countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan and Yemen. Film footage of dead children, the weaponisation of humanitarian aid and the sight of far right extremism on the streets of many countries worldwide add to a sense of despair and fury.

Countries such as Germany, Italy, Austria, Poland and the US have introduced hard-line authoritarian agendas on immigration. The withdrawal of rights and freedoms mount as the political mainstream accept such ideas into their fold in order to win votes. This has involved the media playing a key role by platforming, hyping and legitimising far-right ideas and presenting immigration as a major public concern, even when in terms of most readers’ day-to-day lives, it rarely has significant personal bearing. Keir Starmer’s recent ‘island of strangers’ speech in the UK was a disgraceful move to the right in its rejection of multi-culturalism and its rhetoric of ‘taking back control of our borders’. The worldwide cohort of the super-rich have been fuelling support of far-right groups on either side of the Atlantic, causing economic mayhem, while creating misery for women and minority groups, especially those who are already marginalised and disenfranchised through structural inequalities such as poverty and racism.

The opportunism of the global free market and unfettered capitalism that Naomi Klein wrote about in The Shock Doctrine, exploded the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. She examined the Chigago School economic model advanced by Milton Friedman and endorsed by Thatcher and Reagan, describing this as a form of "disaster capitalism." This allowed political actors to use the chaos of natural disasters, wars, and other crises to promote privatisation and removal of state regulation, welfare and justice. This economic model favours corporate interests while disadvantaging and disenfranchising citizens at a point in which they are too overwhelmed to respond or resist. This provides a platform to create a myriad of new opportunities for profiteering by the oligarchs powering this rapid-fire unmaking of the social and regulatory state. There is no ‘trickle down effect’ that this model purports to deliver. Recently, Klein has written powerfully about this, nearly 20 years on from the Shock Doctrine, in what she describes as the rise of “End of Times Fascism".

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War, conflict and the resulting trauma on the natural world seems inextricably bound to the plundering and exploitation of natural resources that global capitalism fuels. The resources of countries’ land and geology being prized assets to colonise. These thoughts were washing around in my unfocused brain like a foetid pond water while I sat drawing the looming fortifications in the fading spring daylight.

I would like to think that art practice could act as a way to make sense of the loss and destruction of war, but also b used to try to provide some sort of socio-political critique within a cultural landscape dominated by neoliberal economics. It is much needed to counter the fundamentally destructive, prejudiced and short-sighted and greed-fuelled impulses that are destroying the planet.

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Artists who have explored themes of conflict, war and displacement are too many to mention here, and so I will focus on a few of those that tie in to WWII. While studying fine art and art history, I was always drawn to the strange, eerie landscapes of Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash; the soft melancholy line and markmaking of Edward Ardizzone; and Doris Zinkeisen’s powerful “The Burning Down of Huts in Camp 1, Belsen Concentration Camp”, along with her evocative recording of post war relief, rehabilitation and repatriation of prisoners of war and civilian internees.

Another artist whose work has always captivated me is the dark melancholic materiality of Anselm Kiefer’s layered paintings, giant lead books and monumental installations that are a testament to the fragility of human existence. Kiefer, whose father was a captain of the Wehrmacht, has always made work through the lens of the history that formed him. Like many of his generation, it must have been harrowing and agonising trying to come to terms with the facts that were revealed during the war trials of the 1960s. His work is loaded with symbolism and bleakness.

Many other artists across the world are involved today in other projects relating to war, but I wanted to focus here on the work of Judith Tucker, whose painting and writing about art has influenced me in recent years. I came across her work through the Contemporary British Painting (CBP) organisation, of which she was the Chair, a few years before her tragic untimely death in 2023. As well as being a brilliant landscape painter, Judith was an academic and curator, and much of her writing about landscape painting and the links to social history, politics and identity really resonated with me. Her writing about painting is important reading for any landscape painter who views art as a natural, communal expression of meaning and understanding of the human condition, and our place and connections in the world.

Some of her later work can be seen here on the CBP site or on her own website.

When starting the Exile and Return group project, I re-read several of her academic papers, some of which consider the holocaust and her own family’s history in relation to her painting and writing. Her grandmother, mother and aunt fled Berlin for England in 1939 after Kristallnacht, with other family members remaining behind. A moving essay she wrote about a series of paintings she made from family photographs taken just before the war felt relevant to my work about WWII. It can be found on the CBP website here: The Lido in the Forest 

In the text, she explained how, for several years, both her painting practice and her theoretical work considered “the relationship between the practice and objects of landscape painting and theoretical concerns relating to intergenerational transmission”, or what is referred to by Professor Marianne Hirsch as “postmemory.” Postmemory is a concept that is used to describe the relationship that the next generation bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before. They “remember” via the stories, images, and behaviours among which they grew up. The experiences are so deep and affecting that they feel as if they are their own memories. The past is accessed and mediated not by recall, but by “imaginative investment, projection, and creation.” Hirsch notes that the traumatic narratives that precede the second generation’s own lives or consciousness are so powerful that they can sometimes overshadow or displace that generation’s own life stories, with events from the past, which continue to impact on the present.

Judith Tucker used her grandmother’s family photographs to form a powerful group of paintings of swimming pools and diving boards in the landscape. The series started in 2005/6 were from photographs taken in East Germany of her mother learning to swim. She is interested in what she refers to as ‘paranoid readings’ the term used by Marianne Hirsch, where “when looking back into old photographs, they look back at you with the knowledge that something happened.” A photograph shows what looks like a hangman’s noose behind the child’s smiling face in the pool. Although this is likely to be a device to stop novice swimmers from going under, it has chilling symbolism that, while unknown at the time the photo was taken, appears horrifically prescient.

She also visited other sites where the family holidayed in the ‘30s, at a time when Jewish people could not easily be present in the public realm, obtaining archive footage of the construction of the pools and holiday site where the swimming lessons took place. She considers the social agenda of swimming pools as part of Modernism’s direct response to the connected problems of health issues and poor housing. She notes that the Germanic interest in health, and the notion of social hygiene, was also disturbingly linked to what was termed “racial hygiene”. Swimming pools were designed to merge within the landscape in an aesthetic and utopian way rather than be viewed as utilitarian municipal facilities. The pool in this inland resort - Friedrichroda - fits this image, being surrounded by landscaped lawns and terraces with the forests (painted much earlier by Cranach) behind. She later learned that Jews were able to swim in this pool because a larger one to be developed for the 1936 Olympics had recently been built nearby.

Although pools were conceived as social spaces for escapism and a ‘home away from home’, Tucker states: “What intrigues me for my series of paintings is the potential of these designed spaces to contain these informal activities; whilst the paintings and drawings have very few figures depicted in them there is a potential place for them. To image empty pools and their surroundings is, therefore, to invite considerations of who is not there. In my paintings it is very the fact that the depicted spaces are relatively empty that creates a tension and thus the possibility of imaginative projection for any viewer.” Absence in the paintings allows the viewer to draw their own conclusions about who is absent and why, and the relationship with Nazi ideology and actions that may underpin these absences.

She notes that in contemporary times, swimming pools are more likely to be viewed as sites of contagion for superbugs. She states that “In this image of apparent health there are in fact the incipient beginning of a deadly illness, toxicity in the midst of wellbeing. This seems very apt for my project. Thus, implicit in my images of the pool, these images of spaces of pleasure and leisure, are thoughts about those other bodies, those far from healthy bodies that perished in the same forest: in Buchenwald and at Ohrdruf. The entwining of resort and camp is explicitly examined in a sequence in Memories of the Camps. This documentary film of the camps as they were liberated lay for years in the archive of the Imperial War Museum London since, intended for de-nazification purposes, it was considered too inflammatory for release in the aftermath of the war and as new alliances were being formed. The section I describe takes place at the beginning of chapter four and is part of the less polished footage taken by the Russians. The hand-held camera hovers and wobbles slightly as it moves over idyllic-looking scenes of a chalet by a lake surrounded by trees; couples, holiday makers and locals in lederhosen and traditional dress sit, chat, walk and boat; and then, as instructed, the camera pans across to barbed wire and inmates, demonstrating the closeness of the camp to the everyday.”

This chilling imagery was explored more recently in the film “Zone of Interest” which depicts the banality of evil by portraying the lives of a German family living next to Auschwitz who are emotionally immune from the atrocities happening on their doorstep.

The series of painted pools contain an atmosphere of anxious unease with their motifs of high diving boards, springboards and the changing rooms set against a backdrop of trees and sky. There is a dialogue between the manmade and the natural world which creates a tension that Tucker states is one of the subjects of these paintings. “The landscape here serves both as a refuge from city life but also as a threat to the designed spaces of play.” These high diving boards chillingly are depicted in Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film ‘Olympia’. Tucker states “There are other images of the platform derived from photographs of its construction. In one photograph the workers standing atop seem to have a sense of pride and achievement in their task, yet they become transformed through paint to become much less certain: there is a sense of a fragility in the scaffold wrapped around the shadowy diving board, an ambiguity to the figures and in the whole a sense of surveillance. The chiaroscuro has been heightened and the tower is painted in predominantly cool dark blues with some highlights in warmer colours. The ground is painted in reds, pinks and golds, infusing this muddy building site with a hint of violence.”

As a landscape artist interested in holiday resorts, another series was developed when she visited Ahlbeck where her grandparents also holidayed. This is explored in a separate paper entitled Resort ii. In this, she focused on the rich motif of the Strandkörbe which is a hybrid deck chair/beach hut providing temporary shelter - situated on the beach between land and sea - a place of protection, from which to view the sublime. Their looming presence on the flat beach is also a elegiac vehicle for human absence. Working from contemporary sketches of the Strandkörbe and historical photographs, the paintings atmosphere and feel, allow the viewer to sense the meaning and sense of loss and mourning in the works, rather than being overtly intellectualised or articulated.

The third set of work was made in Borneholme, an island in Denmark. On visiting, Judith Tucker came across several concrete installations in the dunes that were made during the German occupation. These became the subject of a set of paintings of what she refers to as ‘unresolved reminders’ or ‘spectral traces’ - remnants of the Third Reich, now neglected but sitting in close proximity to holiday homes. She explores how visiting places such as this bring back traces of the lives of others that cause us to empathise or ‘remember’, even though rationally we know that experiencing the memories of others is an impossibility.

She states: “My paintings and drawings are infused with a sense a sense of being elsewhere than the site of direct experience, of being not there but here. I realised that the paradox of distancing and then attempting to connect across that distance created a tension that became the subject of the work….When working on location now it is as if I attempt to anchor fragments of relived experience in a new embodied encounter, perhaps in an attempt to create a corporeal echo of a ghostly memory.”

She considers that her painterly explorations of her family’s social history become a sort of interrogation of place - a journey back to the past through an embodied exploration in the present. she quotes Tina Wasserman who when analysing other artists’ work stated: ‘landscape and site are concrete remnants of the past that continue to exist in the present. Thus, they have the capacity to be powerful visual surrogates for a tie that no longer exists.”

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This sense of the shifting back and forth in time and conjuring up WWII anecdotes told to me in childhood by my Grandmother, was what I drew on when making work about the German WWII fortifications in Guernsey. Like Borholme, our coasts have been sites of leisure for ordinary citizens for centuries. The fortifications near the bays were places we used to explore and play hide and seek in as children, but with the knowledge of later life, they take on a far grimmer significance. The Channel Islands have also always been sites of military significance for the English and French. This is a complex set of signifiers and emotional content to work with when painting, and something that I have only just started exploring.

Although life under occupation in Guernsey, or being displaced to England, Scotland or Biberach prisoner of war camp was difficult and sometimes life threatening, it cannot be compared to the murder and persecution of the Jewish race; the trauma of living through that period of history not knowing if or how you would survive, and witnessing friends, relatives or whole villages being exterminated.

It is clear though that many local people who had lived through the war years (as children) or who were born just after the war, were deeply scarred by the trauma of occupation. Many were hungry and malnourished themselves, or listened to their parents and grandparents anecdotes growing up as young children, hearing about the hardship near starvation in the final year of occupation. The local population would also have experienced the deprivation of freedom and sense of constantly living under the surveillance of the occupying forces. Others would have been displaced to various parts of the UK either with their mother, or alone and billeted with strangers in a strange place.

The workers who built the fortifications were also victims of the Nazis and their suffering is inseparable from the observation and understanding of the buildings’ history and sense of place. Several older people visiting the exhibition said they remembered seeing large groups of men being marched around the roads by soldiers from the campsite they lived on near La Houguette School. Others reminisced about their parents trying to surreptitiously leave food in hedges or outbuildings for the starving slave workers.

My own work, which has only been a six months in the making, barely scratches the surface of what it may be possible to understand by developing work that uses these sites of war to link together the past, present and future. The archives are a truly remarkable depository of local history, imagery and long-forgotten lives. I feel it is important to memorialise these anonymous men who changed our landscape as they are rarely mentioned and never named as individual people in our local history. The archives hold the names and addresses of all of those who were brought to the Island as labourers, and it would be meaningful to create some site on the Island that recognises them - both in respect of the hardship that they bore, and in terms of the futility of war.

The contributors’ work, which is all very different in terms of medium, scale and subject matter, sparks off each other and creates interesting dynamics and interrelationships. Many visitors have found the exhibition moving, especially those who lived through the war. Several people have been tearful reading through the material accompanying the art work or seeing images of youthful photographs of now dead relatives taken in Biberach.

I hope to write about some of the other contributors’ work here soon.

Exile and Return – A group exhibition commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Bailiwick of Guernsey from Nazi occupation. Part 2.

As part of the Exile and Return Exhibition this May, as a landscape painter, I wanted to create my contribution around the subject of the German fortifications. These were built by the Nazis during the occupation of the Channel Islands in WWII.  In viewing these fortresses and bunkers as sites of memory and history, it felt important to understand how they came into being.  

Thousands of labourers carried out the relentless task of building these brutalist concrete constructions that, after 80 years, are now an almost accepted part of our coastline to local people. The majority of islanders today will have grown up with their presence. However, in 1945 and 1946, they must have felt like a strange hostile presence for the thousands of returning evacuees and soldiers, including my maternal grandparents. The landscape must have appeared irredeemably ruptured by these sinister jarring structures.

My Grandmother had told me many anecdotes about her return to Guernsey. She had mentioned that one of the derelict cottages, in Mount Durand where she and my family lived, had been used by some of the slave workers as a shelter. On her return, the whole area carried the odour of rotting fish, as piles of fish bones and waste matter was heaped outside the building: the meagre scraps of food that these starving men had to scavenge and catch to survive on.

To set the occupation in context, following the defeat of France, Winston Churchill decided that British troops be withdrawn from the Channel Islands and redeployed. This left the five islands completely demilitarised. Around 25,000 occupants were evacuated to Britain including almost all of Alderney’s residents. This represented around half the population of Guernsey and a fifth of the people from Jersey. Residents born outside of the islands were deported to internment camps in Biberach, Germany.

Life was very different for local people living under occupation. The currency was changed to the Reichsmark, all news sources like the radio were banned and everyone had to drive on the other side of the road. Cinemas only showed German propaganda films and schools had German books. Anyone who disobeyed orders faced imprisonment or deportation to Nazi prisons, labour camps and concentration camps. By the end of 1944, food shortages were terrible and starvation was only alleviated in December by a Red Cross ship, the Vega, bearing food.

Organisation Todt (OT),which built the fortifications in the Channel Islands, was the civilian building arm of the German  Services, headed up by Fritz Todt and Albert Speer. It was initially used to construct a megalomaniac vision of an imperial centre in Germany and a motorway network that scrolled outwards into the occupied territories. After war had broken out, the workforce repaired roads, railways and bridges and worked on the cross-Channel coastal artillery batteries in Calais, the French Atlantic coast and the Channel Islands.  Hitler believed the Channel Islands might be a ‘stepping stone’ from which to invade Britain. The Islands’ capture was also viewed as a propaganda tool, to show that the Nazis occupied British land. To achieve this end, 10% of the steel and concrete used in Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall”, and one twelfth of the resources, were used in the Channel Islands.

As in the other occupied territories, civilian construction firms and workers were employed from both occupied Europe and the islands. Other unemployed labourers from France, Belgium and the Netherlands were conscripted to work on the buildings. The OT workers wore the khaki uniforms of the German skilled workers (surveyors, blacksmiths, welders, carpenters etc). The unskilled workers who had worked as labourers in Germany and on the motorways became the overseers of the large number of forced labourers which OT gathered from the occupied countries of Europe.

Prisoners of War and inmates from the Neuengamme concentration camp were brought over from Europe as slave labourers to build fortifications and tunnels, along with around one thousand French Jews. Others were indiscriminately rounded up in their countries under a compulsory work scheme, including some school aged boys.  Forced Labourers in the Channel Islands were often referred to as “the Russians”, but the greater number consisted of Polish workers, Algerians, French Jewish men and Spanish Republicans. Nazi party members regarded the forced workers as ‘Untermenschen’ (inferior people).

Islanders in Guernsey who took pity on the harsh treatment of these men were severely punished. In Alderney, the Nazis established four concentration camps to hold the prisoners. By 1943 the total number of forced labourers on the island was over 4,000. Conditions were harsh and many of the prisoners were murdered

In a report commissioned by Lord Pickles, President and UK Special Envoy on Post Holocaust Issues, a panel of 13 international experts found evidence that the number of murders in Alderney was likely to range between 641 and 1,027. While a definitive list of names of those who died in Alderney was impossible to achieve, experts said they have created a database gathered from a wealth of archival information, that was often ‘hiding in plain sight’.

The majority of the workers who constructed the fortifications were returned to France in October 1943 where they worked on sites for flying bombs. Many made off into the woods when the Allied Forces landed in Normandy in June 1944, but gave themselves up to American troops and were questioned about the tunnels in the Channel Islands, to find out if these contained secret weapons, but they did not.  

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During my own research, I looked in the Bailiwick Archive to find out more about the labourers. It contained records of all the individuals brought in to do the construction work. Seeing the typed or the curlicued handwritten script of the German administrators outlining the names and addresses of origin of these men (and a few women), it really made the reality of this period more palpable and horrifying.

Letters from the Platzcommandantur were included in the archive files and it was chilling to see these letters, headed with local addresses, signed “Heil Hitler” at the end of the correspondence. Letters from the Controlling Committee of the States of Guernsey, continued with some of the administration work of the Guernsey government. This included granting some identity permits to Todt workers who had married local women.

The German forces began surrendering the Channel Islands on 9 May 1945, as Nazi Germany had been defeated.

Film archives were available on Youtube Channel Islands Part 4 - Organization Todt - Der Westwall - Battery Mirus - Occupied Guernsey showing some of the fortifications being created. The faces of some of these men and boys in the film looked haunted, being marched in large numbers around the islands by armed German soldiers. At points the film focuses on the feet of some of these men. Many of the slave workers’ feet and lower legs are swathed in wrappings that resemble the cement bags, that when full, weigh down their gaunt frames. Often arriving during summer time, they had no clothing or footwear to withstand the bitter winter winds of the islands, so were forced to make improvised protection from whatever could be found.

I started by making some charcoal drawings of the film stills that I had captured on my phone - many of the screenshots taken from the film were out of focus and blurred, which somehow made them feel all the more otherworldly and heartrending. The eyes of a marching labourer stare guardedly out at the cameraman - it is unclear whether this is a silent rebuke or a plea. Others captured the conscripted and paid OT workers with their berets and uniforms pick-axing and shovelling the rugged landscape to lay the steel frames and foundations for the blocky concrete fortifications, often in the hot sun.

After this, I then worked on small wooden panels using the drawings from the reference material. The use of colour in the paintings is non-naturalistic. This is because, for me, painting is more about creating a sense of atmosphere and place through the materiality of paint, rather than a visual likeness. I wanted these to be small intimate paintings that viewers could get close to, unlike the landscape paintings which need distance. I like the idea of the viewers unconsciously choreographing their own steps, forward and back, through the exhibition space as they move between sombre landscape and the ‘intimate immensity’ of the tiny figures.

While making this work, I was thinking about my family, their life before the war in the Island, and the profound sense of loss they must have felt while experiencing occupation, and evacuation.  To give a sense of life as it was for them before the occupation, here are a few photographs of them, including my great-gran and her formidable sisters dressed in their best, enjoying life at home and in the local landscape.

The beaches cliffs and common land are important sites of remembrance and of social connection. They allow anyone here to revel in the natural world, as people have done for centuries. To do so is one of life’s great pleasures; one that is still accessible to those of us who are not financially wealthy. It is important that site such as this, and the raft of spaces once used for the horticultural industry, are not exploited by those who see only the financial worth and the development potential of land, or view it as a means of attracting the affluent to the island. This model has been tried and dismally tested by the Barclay Brothers in Sark, at great trauma and heartache to local families, so should be a wake-up call to local people who do not wish to see the Bailiwick become Monaco-by-Sea.

The images of historical Guernsey life are a fertile source of reimagining and interpreting how it was to live in the Islands and how the future might be, at a time before the island revolved around the pro-market policymaking of neoliberalism. With little challenge locally, as everywhere else, this has invidiously become the premise that is seen as the sole legitimate organising principle for human life, with its tiny group of winners, and vast swathe of losers.

The land in the islands is valuable to different groups in different ways. It could easily be exploited if planning policy is liberalised - a direction policy seems to be moving in. Only recently, land in a fairly built up area, where greenhouses have been left to slump and disintegrate in the winter winds, has been given permission for housing. It will be interesting to see if this is used for much needed social housing or for large and profitable private projects. It should be borne in mind that many of our politicians own horticultural land, and while many of them may care deeply about biodiversity and ecological issues, others may have a more short-sighted vision.

The Island is likely to change drastically in the coming decades with the dystopian future that neoliberalism promises, with its acceleration of climate emergency and the exponential loss of biodiversity. Lets ensure that wild spaces still remain and remain for all, and that those who continue to pollute and destroy our world are constantly challenged at both a local and global level.

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I have a real sense that this body of work will grow and develop long after the exhibition ends. Using archive material has been a revelation: a creative wellspring and a highly emotional and impactful way of learning about the past as a contextual source for painting. It has also made me reconsider using photographs as source material in my painting practice - a process that I had previously found deadening and unintuitive, preferring to draw from life.

As this article was getting rather long, I will break off here. I hope to continue writing about this project in the blog, looking next at why art that focuses on the impact of warfare and displacement is important. I was thinking about this frequently when making this work, while also looking at the many artists and art writers within the wider discourse of painting (and wider fine art practice) who made work dealing with conflict, war and the holocaust.

Exile and Return Exhibition

Exile and Return – A group exhibition commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Bailiwick of Guernsey from Nazi occupation.

Last Autumn I was asked by the local artist, Rosanne Guille, if I would take part in an art project to commemorate the liberation of the Bailiwick of Guernsey from the Nazi Occupation. 2025 was the 80th anniversary year, and the idea had been suggested to her by Rev’d Dr Adrian Datta. Adrian wanted to celebrate the event in a memorable way at St Pierre du Bois Church.

Rosanne Guille and Rev’d Dr. Adrian Datta

Adrian said:

“The 80th Liberation Day Celebration is hugely significant in the life of the Bailiwick.   Sadly, but inevitably, there are fewer and fewer people around who lived through the Occupation years either here or overseas. Those who are, are in the autumn of their lives and it is correct and right that their experiences should be honoured, remembered and marked in a very special and clear way.   The Occupation Arts Collective allows this to be done through the medium of the visual arts. It will leave a permanent legacy of this occasion.

This diverse exhibition will represent a number of distinct responses and interpretations of the experience of exile and return and will be open for six weeks based at the parish church of St Pierre du Bois and also in the Rectory Fellowship rooms.

This project is rooted, grounded and shaped in and by the community.   It will enhance and facilitate community engagement and involvement including schools and other interest groups.   A number of artists’ talks and workshops will be scheduled during the exhibition period providing insight to the creative process and honouring the historicity of this subject.”

Taking part was not a difficult decision to make.  I had grown up hearing stories of this harsh period of local history. My Mum’s family were either evacuated from Guernsey at the outset of the war, or lived through the occupation on the Island.

It was not just this that resonated though; it felt like what was occurring in 2024, with the rise of nationalism, far-right authoritarianism and other forms of conflict across the world, it was an important anniversary to remember. The extremes of warfare, displacement and the horrifying culmination - the death camps of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Aktion T4 during WWII were the product of far right ideology; something that all societies should never forget in order to prevent fascism from ever taking control again.

As a landscape painter, I knew that to make meaningful work, I needed to start by considering the impact of the Occupation on both the natural world and on individuals and our communities. Landscape art today is wide ranging and includes a broad spectrum of approaches and views. It can be used to consider cultural, social and economic development, environmental degradation, urbanisation, displacement and warfare. For me, it is a means of exploring the human condition and our place in the world, alongside these issues and concerns. Painting especially, is a potent carrier of memory and identity, as well as a conveyor of emotions such as loss, joy, hope and of the act of memorialisation. By documenting the sites that carry the scars and reminders of the Occupation of the Islands, I hoped to tap into the lives that had gone before, the personal and collective memories of islanders, and the untold histories and human existences, in order to connect with people now.

The relationship we have with the environment we are born into, shapes our understanding of the world and creates a sense of community and shared identity. Our collective living gives us a sense of place as a location filled with meaning. In The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, Edward S Casey states “To be at all—to exist in any way—is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place. Place is as requisite as the air we breathe, the ground on which we stand, the bodies we have. We are surrounded by places. We walk over and through them. We live in places, relate to others in them, die in them. Nothing we do is unplaced. How could it be otherwise?”

‘Place’ means more than our physical connection to the land. It is also the meaning we assign to it as part of our individual and community identity – both in terms of the historical, the here and now, and how we wish to imagine it for others in the future.

To do justice to this project, I felt I needed to understand the history of this period more than the little I knew from the stories my Gran had told me, snippets of contemporary history from junior school, or the fragments my Mum remembered about the war years (she had returned to Guernsey aged 7 having been evacuated to Burnley with brother, cousins, and my Gran). To learn more, I first visited the Priaulx Library, a rich source of local history. It was also suggested that I visit the Bailiwick archives, where a huge amount of documentation of the second world war is stored.

Here I found my Great-grandparents’ identity cards that they were given during the Occupation - all islanders had to carry them on their person. I also found out a great deal more, including records of all the workers that were brought to the islands to build the fortifications.

My Great-Grandparents’ Registration Forms with the German Forces in Guernsey during the Occupation. Courtesy of the Bailiwick Archives.

I normally start a new art project by walking, sitting and drawing in a specific site. Guernsey is strewn with concrete buildings from German Occupation. The authorities here have lost count of the number of bunkers there are in the Island, but there are over 1,000. I started by drawing around the coast, at some of the coastal defences. I like the fact that nature has defiantly taken over many of the bunkers, with ancient gorse bushes shrouding many of the sites on L’Ancresse common. Others such as Fort Hommet and Mirus Battery are maintained as tourist and educational sites.

A few of these drawings and plein air sketches are posted below.

Over the next few months, these were worked up into larger paintings back in the studio (below).

I have put together a second area of work connected to this exhibition, which I will cover in the next part of my blog soon. This relates to Organisation Todt and the workers who created the fortifications in the Channel Islands.

I also hope to cover some of the other artist’s work included in the exhibition in the coming weeks.

Exile and Return Exhibition runs until 26th June, and is open Thursday 8th May from 10am to 4pm, plus weekends 10am to 4pm. It can also be seen during weekdays - contact Rosanne Guille for appointments on 07781 122385.

À la perchôine!

‘All Shall Be Well.’ An exhibition of recent paintings by Deborah Grice.

An elliptical light washes over many of Deborah Grice’s recent landscape paintings, suggesting either early morning or dusk; times when natural phenomena blur together becoming indistinct and silent.  The only traces of human life are provided by the precise outlines of what at first appears to be aircraft sight lines for landing, or a sea level tracery of lights on the distant shores beyond a vast stretch of water.  

Title: “Glimmers of Possibility’

Size: 20cm x 32.2cm

Medium: Oil on canvas

Sharply defined lines appear like precision-cut metal on the surface of many of the paintings. Paradoxically, they feel both comforting and foreboding.  They draw the eye across and into the painting like a mysterious golden thread.

There are other puzzling ambiguities in many of the works.  In ‘Renewed Horizon’ the spectral outline of a barn appears within a dark line of trees, like a faded architect’s blueprint floating within flooded meadowland. It might be a prototype waiting to be built, or the chimeric delineation of a long-deserted homestead within a post-industrial hinterland. It is a country where time is an unknown. 

The paintings have been painstaking built up layer-by-layer which gives them a deep luminosity. This dark limpid viscosity, combined with the spectral barns and voided spaces within bodies of water, makes the work feel both darkly poetic and subtly surreal.

I asked Deborah about her process, knowing that the deep tonal contrast and richness is not easy or quick to reach. With the darker paintings, she primes with Michael Harding’s Burnt Sienna or Raw Sienna which are both very transparent grounds. If she wants to create a pale, cool painting, she will use a white primer. Painters often overlook the importance of a carefully considered (and applied) substrate and ground, both of which are so vital in maintaining the transparent luminosity of oil paint.  The paint is built up in thin layers over a chiaroscuro under-painting. Deborah doesn’t use traditional colours to create the darks and lights but goes straight in with the blues and yellows. She leaves the warming up and ‘bringing forward’ to glazes with a transparent red or yellow oxide. The paintings take weeks to produce but during some studio visits they are only worked on for about an hour at a time. It is vital that each layer dries fully before the next is applied.

Title: ‘Renewed Horizon’

Size: 20cm x 32.2cm

Medium: Oil on canvas

Deborah’s work draws on the philosophy and aesthetics of the nineteenth century romantic landscape painters such as Samuel Palmer, whose work often depicted classical ruins or dense mysterious forests, which at a time of rapid industrialisation and social change, harked back nostalgically to classical civilisations.

Her paintings have a sensibility of ‘Englishness’, a noun which thirty or so years ago when she studied at Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art, would have, very likely have been used as an insult.  By appropriating the visual tropes of the English Romantics, she lures the viewer into a sense of familiarity, whilst using the genre to explore the complex connections underpinning our relationship with the natural world, and our own human frailty and vulnerability.  This underscores the need to work with the ecosystem and view humanity as part of it, rather than as a resource to exploit.

Today, the most interesting forms of contemporary landscape painting are not concerned with the representation of scenic views. Instead, they use metaphor, allegory, or the visual language of the past, to allude to many of the difficult issues of our time.  This might be displacement and migration; questions of boundaries and belonging with the disquieting undercurrents of nationalism; conflict and war; or climate crisis and the rapid loss of biodiversity.  

Artists like Deborah also tap into personal experience, memory, and history, allowing residual traces of past events, remembered landscapes, or childhood tales embedded in the individual or collective consciousness, to shimmer into being in mind of the viewer. The paintings mesmerise by evoking a sense of uncertainty or duality: should we be marvelling in the splendour of the natural world, or despairing at our neglect of it?

Title: “Sublime Possibilities 1”

Size: 26cm x 38cm

Medium: Carbon Powder on Paper

Speaking to her as she was preparing for the show, I asked her about its title - ‘All Shall be Well’. She explained that she views her paintings as emotional landscapes that reflect the issues and feelings that trouble her. The works reflect the layered complexity of her past interwoven with the anxiety of the volatile world where our dependence on others, humans, and non-humans, is so often flagrantly ignored.

Deborah’s interaction with, and love of nature, provides comfort at a time when the world appears to be on the edge of an environmental and political abyss. Although she cannot predict the future, her work offers up hope and a visual space to consider humanity’s essential dependency and interconnectedness with the natural world.

As someone who grew up within a church-going household, but later in life rejected organised religion for a wider sense of faith, spirituality and the sacred, it is telling that ‘All shall be well’ is a saying that was coined by the fourteenth century female radical theologian and mystic, Julian of Norwich.

Julian lived through the turbulent times of the bubonic plague and the Hundred Years’ War. She was considered by many to be a heretic, purely because of her sex; this was a time that life and religion were even more deeply patriarchal than they are in the present. As a woman, she imagined the divine in a very different way from traditional theologians, whose religious views and discourse were highly combative and dogmatic. Her writing, according to Anglican theologian, Maggie Ross, is much more layered and malleable to interpretation[1] – seemingly in the same way that complex and nuanced painting is.

Julian finds the divine in the land and the soil. She talks about the blood, grime, and commonality of death within the everyday domestic life of the period, writing very much ‘as a woman’. Acknowledging that life was painful, loving others was essential, and even in hardship, grace was still possible, she seems a truly relevant voice in our complex and divided times.

Her voice somehow seems to recognise the significance of embodiment - something, in my mind, that is important in philosophy, feminist politics and art practice, as it is, no doubt, for women theologians. This seems even more vital at a time when women’s bodily autonomy is being challenged across the world by conservative ideologues.

In relation to art objects - paintings, sculpture, installations etc., the physicality of the artwork, and the way it is made, is an integral part of how it is perceived. In ‘The Phenomenology of Perception[2]’, Maurice Merleau-Ponty sets out the view that ‘being in the world’ is not about passive engagement with our environment and everything around us. We are in constant active engagement with it, through use of our motor skills, interaction in space, our movement, sense of self, and use of nonverbal behaviour. Embodied knowledge also relates to what we know before we are aware of the act of knowing. It is, essentially, the reason why the artwork can hold such power and presence.

Engagement with an artwork offers up a sense of intimacy to both its creator and the viewer. Its making and viewing necessarily involves our embodied experience. Its colour, shape, texture and smell involve both our senses, but engagement also taps into the cultural and historical contexts within which we live. These contexts are also embodied, as they are transmitted through physical practices, perception, rituals and myths, oral storytelling, dance, and the myriad of other forms of embodied knowledge.

Visual language is developed and situated in an earlier and deeper place within our consciousness than verbal language, and often involves feelings and emotions that are complex and impossible to put into words. To the viewer, a free-floating attention is required to penetrate and make sense of a painting or art object. This links in to our present and past, to our memory and our bodily experience.

Embodied experience highlights the importance of the senses in an age of visual hyperstimulation, where we are overloaded with information and accelerated visual representation through advertising, social media, and film/TV imagery. Painting like Deborah’s allows us to slow down and contemplate.  She says, “I think my work can be overlooked in the current art climate, where louder statements are being made, with a message that can be read and digested in seconds. My work takes longer to ponder…  If people can see their innermost selves reflected in my work, then I have achieved what I intended.”

 In relation to this new body of work, she states, “I have an innate conviction that I can cope with life, however desperate it becomes. I pray, I problem solve and most importantly I ‘hope’. I want my work to offer an insight into otherness and positivity that is based in human experience, not religious theory, or self-help Instagram slogans. Not only do I strive to offer a resonating sensation that is felt deep in the gut, but I also want the viewer to know “I get it, I see your pain” and through life’s difficulties; “All shall be Well”.

There is a quiet generosity in this sentiment. Much as we may be angry or despairing at the state of the world, in climate emergency and war, it is important to continue to care.  In the words of Rebecca Solnit, just after the 2024 American election:

“Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the 10 trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed. There’s a false dichotomy between the popular business of self-care and being engaged and caring for other things; doing the latter can bring you into community with people who are good for you, can help you find dignity,… can strengthen and encourage you – and even make you hopeful, because to be around the best versions of human nature does that for you.”[3]

Deborah’s work, with its quiet, visceral strength stays with you long after exiting the exhibition space.  It creates an arena for collective hope; something that is much needed right now.

All Shall be Well is showing at The Biscuit Factory, 16 Stoddart Street, Sheildfield, Newcastle upon Tyne from 23rdNovember 2024 to February 2025

[1] Silence: A user’s guide — Volume 2, Application, Maggie Ross,  Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd

[2] The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Routledge, 2013

[3] Authoritarians like Trump love fear, defeatism, surrender. Do not give them what they want, Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian, 9th November, 2024.