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March 19, 2012
Queenstown is haunted by its past. It casts a big shadow over the town. How is this haunting represented?
Raymond Arnold runs Landscape Art Research Queenstown (LARQ) in Queentown Tasmania. 'The Dead March Here Today' is Arnold's winning entry in the $20,000 Gallipoli art prize in 2010. It is the cenotaph in the night at Devonport in Tasmania:
Raymond Arnold, 'The Dead March Here Today', 2010, oil on canvas.
Arnold, who regularly visited the Somme while living on and off in Paris during the 1990s had a grandfather who lost both legs to the medical condition of trench foot while serving in France. He said:
I grew up in the 1950s and 60s surrounded by men like that, including Japanese POWs, who had been damaged by conflict. I am carrying all that baggage, as so many people do.Everybody seems to have a story.There are hundreds of cenotaphs in Australia and New Zealand.The Devonport cenotaph could be any of them. It could be any cenotaph, any group of names that speak of great sacrifice, great honour to the people on these. They are sacred places.
It suggests a spectral figures of the past that still live with, and haunt, us.
Arnold has been walking, cycling and making his own artwork in those old World War I battlefields of Europe for decades:
Raymond Arnold, Bayeux soldat I - Polish lancer 2004, two-plate etching.
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