Rosalind Barker

‘The Send Off’ – contemporary artists forge new conversations with Wilfred Owen, Carol Ann Duffy and the Great War.

Knole House, The National Trust, Sevenoaks, Kent

July 28th – August 29th 2014

Eighteen contemporary artist’s responses to two texts. One is a contemporaneous WW1 poem by Wilfrid Owen called ‘The Send Off’, the other a response to it by the current Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy called ‘Unseen’

‘An Unseen’ takes its title from and responds to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, while also reflecting on Wilfred Owens ‘The Send Off’. Owens potential at the tender age of 25 was abruptly curtailed in the trenches during the final week of the war. He joined the lost hundreds of thousands of British soldiers.

‘An Unseen’ represents the lost individual memories, personalities, emotions, dreams and intellects destroyed by the First World War and a Century of time. The artist’s thoughts were of how to make this unseen internal, intangible essence of humanity physical.

‘An Unseen’

Each graphite dot or circle denotes 100 British soldiers, each square 1000 creating the total loss of 660,000 men in the drawn graph. (War Office statistics 1921)