The Ploughshare And The Sword: An Anthology Of Silence At Settle

When the circumstances of war conspire to confound expectation in brutally unforeseen ways, memory is put to the work of irony. Memory work fills the spaces vacated by the dead, allows the imagination to recreate that which is most meaningful to the aggrieved. A clinging to vestigial remembrance, to the shape and sound of a lost figure, forges a dissonant connection in the name of grief.

And for some, the needful connection, the refusal to let go, sustains. One of the poems in the heartbreaking new exhibition which recently opened at Settle’s Folly, commemorates one grieving mother in Clapham whose son didn’t return from Flanders, and whose descendants remain determined to inscribe her subsequent actions in perpetuity by drawing our attention to one of the concealed costs of war, an inability to lay ghosts to rest. Ian Duhig’s plaintive elegy ‘War Artist’ recalls the moment, every Thursday after the Great War had ended, that Edward Dawson’s mother made a pilgrimage up the fell behind Clapham’s Bleak Bank, for a vantage point to see the train which would one day bear her son home. Except that it never would, the steam disappearing into the distance, as symbolically evanescent as the catching and holding of love. Duhig’s beautiful metaphor makes of the mother an artist, creating images in the steam, in desperate want of a last corporeal touch, of longing transfigured into flesh:



The exhibition is entitled Anthology of Silence in recognition of those interstices between words which sometimes define meaning: the falling silent of guns, the deafening moments before birds in the line break into song, the stoical silence of the Conscientious Objector. A seamless collaboration of art, photography and poetry, which successfully maintains the integrity of each form, the exhibition is a culmination of several years of planning and research, yielding, finally, a unique window on a familiar story.

The celebrants – award-winning poet Ian Duhig, renowned abstract artist Philippa Troutman and photographer Rob Freeman - have assembled a deeply affecting collage of words and images which examines the relationship between the past and the present through the prismatic memories of North Craven descendants of some of those directly involved in the war. Interviews with the project’s participants have encouraged the release of unusual artistic perspectives and surprising insights, but most of all, have given vent to a sense of continuity through practice which identifies a diffusion of ways of remembering.

A definition, here, would be entirely counter-productive, but one thread unites the exhibition’s narrative: the recurring presence of tokens of artisanal labour underwrite that continuity, bind ties between the past and the present, give shape and form to the past in the present. Bootmakers Dan Nelson and his son John are the most recent in a long generational line of Settle cobblers. Dan’s grandfather, also John, served in France, and returned to take up a career as Battalion Shoemaker for the Duke of Wellington’s regiment in Halifax. In an act of homage, Rob Freeman’s accompanying photograph in the exhibition has Dan sitting precisely as his grandfather sat in the one extant photo taken of the latter, a century before. And it is with great perspicacity that Philippa Troutman’s impressionistic ‘Battlefield’ pictures - which incarcerate a tortured landscape against a backdrop of wrecked trees that could be shell bursts, and silhouetted birds whose brazen ambiguity hints at Van Gogh in an anxiety of aerial crucifixes – should lace the foregrounded barbed wire with the waxed thread which grandfather and grandson use(d) in the making of boots. There is, as the artist notes, real and implied disorder in the line.

And it is to that line that she returns with crushing irony in the codiciliary ‘Bird’ which depicts the image of a small, fading creature, caught in the hideous barbs of wire. The savage irony of organic life transfixed on sharp steel could not be rendered more purposefully, and there is irony too in the idea of occupational continuity, of the ‘dignity’ of a labour which, alongside the making of field borders designed to keep sheep in, also created the hideous military accoutrements upon which soldiers were commonly suspended, broken, like Ixion on the Wheel.

It is well that Ian Duhig’s fine verse commentaries do their utmost to bleed pathos into reminiscence, or rather, to distil inference from testimony. As simply and painstakingly wrought as this singularly affecting theme demands, the poems honour the past through tokens which are magnified to symbols in the exegesis of meaning. In ‘Napoo’ - trench Franglais for ‘dead and gone’ – the ubiquitous soldier’s kitbag is a concealer of dark memory and reflection. Wrapped in a pastiche of the soldier song ‘Pack up your Troubles’, this desperately moving series of octets plays around the margins of that willed silence which commonly afflicts the returning soldier. The irony of song, of words filling the void, is now transcribed from the testimonies of those such as Sue Dodgson, Ethel Wrathall and Sue Snell whose relatives had links with the Friends Ambulance Unit:



Philippa Troutman’s powerfully enigmatic accompanying collage, ‘Missing’, draws the viewer into a web of contemplation: a red cross motif gives visual focus to a background of mustard-gas sky and vapid green earth; a billowing deckchair breathes counter-intuitive life into the drained canvas, serving as a reminder both of absence and of pre-war memory.

Elsewhere, tokens of remembrance take on reinvigorated meaning by associative inference. The story of the POW’s drawing of a horse on a wall, retold by his daughter-in-law Joan Clapham, is emblematic of a life lived beyond the prison cell, of an agrarian existence in the north of England which becomes a mirror to home. Ian Duhig’s ‘The Wooden City’ takes the suggestion a step further, disinterring the irony of juxtaposed purpose in the ‘Trojan Horse’ of a prison camp. The enemy imprisoned within its flanks dream of another horse, a working horse, whose benign, sustained labour embodies a noble peace, and enshrines an inherent sense of heimat in a language other than German.

As a witness to this wonderfully-curated and powerfully emotive exhibition – the suspension of poems at eye level around the centre of the room, and the splashes of diverting colour around the edges combine to hypnotic effect – the viewer becomes votive. And if he or she is to take away one abiding image it might be of the ‘Death Penny’. The presentation to bereaved families of a small wooden plaque to honour the loved one’s war service posthumously was a commonplace during the conflict, and the token would have held particular poignancy in the instance of Edwin Clapham of Bentham, who was killed by a German machine gun bullet on the 31st October, 1918, two weeks before the armistice, at the age of 20. Rob Freeman’s photograph of Joan Clapham carrying the plaque – the Death Penny – bears its own commemorative weight, whilst the accompanying poem recalls, in the rhythmical momentum of captured moments in a young man’s short life, the symbolic resonance of pennies in the honouring of the dead. Ian Duhig could do no finer service to the memory of Edwin Clapham than to grant him a soldier’s return:




Anthology of Silence is showing at The Folly, Victoria St, Settle until July 14th
www.thefolly.org.uk