Dawn Turner Designs

So, the research has begun.  I met with Keith last week, who was indeed a mine of information.  His focus as been about the family history of the brother and sister that these two particular memorial plaques commemorate – Edwin & Margaret Hasse.  He’s been able to track down quite a lot of information and documents about not only the two casualties, but on the rest of the family.

I was intrigued to hear about the letters home that Edwin wrote to his mother, they sound ‘jolly cheerful’ – whether that was Edwin’s disposition, or an attempt to not worry his mother, we will probably never know.  But his older brother, Frank, who also served during the war kept a war journal and few years later, this was published.  It often tells a rather different side, and yet these two brothers were in the same regiment and so were often in the same place – so it can’t just be down to geography that one place wasn’t so bad as the other.

I am still reading through the diaries, there’s quite a lot to read!  But interesting little snippets are coming out, and for now, it feels as though my project is going that way.

I feel like the project could be huge; that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and actually I don’t think I can do the Death Pennies enough justice in the short space of time we have.

The next few days should see a flurry of activity as I attempt to translate the feelings of these diaries into something visual – it’s making me think and work in quite a new way – what a challenge!

Tommy at Seaham.  No, this isn’t connected to the Hasse pennies in any way (as far as I know), I just happened to visit this sculpture at Christmas when I was visiting friends ‘up north’.

It’s interesting though, that despite me knowing I wanted to apply for the residency, at that point I hadn’t even been interviewed, so I didn’t even know if I would get the position, never mind that WW1 would be the focus of my project.

So, I mentioned in my last post that I had been successful in my application to be an artist in residence.  It’s at Erewash Museum in Ilkeston, but I didn’t know what I was going to be looking at.

I met with the manager Helen last week.  After discussing a few options, it was decided that the focus of my residency will be a recent acquisition for the museum.  This is a pair of rare memorial plaques, or ‘death pennies’ as they are often known.   As a result of the Unexamined Lives project, the plaques were gifted to the museum from Canada, where they’d ended up many years ago.

This week, I am going to meet with Keith Oseman.  Keith has apparently done lots of research on these, and the family members they memorialised, to find out more.  I am already intrigued by what information is already out there and what I have already found out.  Before reading about the acquisition recently, I didn’t know such things existed.  I also never knew there was a Moravian settlement in Ockbrook, a place I travel through often.  Click here for a recent article in Ilkeston Life that tells you a little about how the ‘death pennies’ found their way home.

My brain is in overdrive at the moment, thinking about all the possible directions that this research and the project could go.  Should I go down the route of looking further at the death pennies in general? How and why the originated, what people did with them?  Or I might delve deeper in to the family background and the Moravian settlement – Ockbrook is part of Erewash after all.  Where do I even start?

I can end up down the ‘rabbit hole’ when I start my research, which often starts out as text and photo rather than drawing studies (with the style of my work, drawing is not always the most appropriate beginning).  What work do I do at the museum on days in residence?  I try not to think too much about final outcomes at this stage, although sometimes I can’t help already thinking about possible ideas.

But for now, I am going to try and rein in the ideas until I have at least spoken to Keith to find out what he knows.

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I know I am rubbish at keeping this blog updated!  But…at the weekend, I received some exciting news.  I applied for a residency at my local Erewash Museum as part of Arts Erewash rEvive project.  And I got offered a place!

It will be a great opportunity to develop some new work.  At this point in time I don’t know what I will be working with.  I wanted to go back to those heady days of Foundation and Degree years.  Those days when we were set a project with perhaps just a title or a very small brief.  I’ve had a good few years of exploring new techniques and technologies.  Sometimes though, these have not fully come to fruition because I have not had a direction to take them in.

With this residency, I am really looking forward to going back to experimenting, responding to outcomes and developing ideas as I go along.  At this moment in time, I don’t want to have an end game in mind. I don’t want to have a preconceived idea of the finished product. I want to avoid, if I can, steering it towards what I already know.   I’m looking to the staff at the Museum to see if there’s an area they’d like to bring attention to.  Something in the archives that they want to shed new light on, a collection they want me to explore.  I am hoping this will encourage me to work spontaneously and that it will inspire me to investigate some of these little used techniques a little more.

Watch this space, it might also encourage me to blog a little more often!

(the image shows a close up of the installation that I made collaboratively with Gavin Darby of Frailloop three or four years ago, that sits in the Museum garden)