Raymond Arnold

In Harm's Way / Ligne de Chance
12 April to 13 May 2007
Carnegie Gallery, Hobart

Tasmanian artist Raymond Arnold has gained an international reputation as a fine printmaker. Over the past decade the artist has produced three distinct generations of etchings around the theme of war and shielding the body. The prints were made each summer at the renowned Atelier Lacourière et Frélaut in Paris, the artist drawing his copperplate images in the studio, and master printers Louis Bouzou and Luc Guerin pulling the proofs and editions in the workshop. Although many of these works have been shown in the United Kingdom, Europe, America and Australia, this is the first time they have been brought together as a whole.

In Harm’s Way, significantly opening on ANZAC Day 2007 as a homage to all soldiers, consists of: Memory/History (1998), ten monumental etchings of flower wreaths, facial and body armour to commemorate the Arnold family’s service at the Somme; Body Armour/Char Corps (2001-2003), a fifteen-print ‘etching catalogue’ of a suit of armour that belonged to the sixteenth-century French king, Henri IV, and fifteen identical images of cloth, and Bayeux Soldiers (2004-2007), a series of torsos in battle dress inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry and mannequins in the Caen museum dedicated to the soldiers of the WW 11 D-Day Landings.

The etchings illustrate the artist’s emotional and intellectual fascination with the theme of body armour, using complex theoretical constructs based on the duality of things. Armour’s ability to protect the soft human body and at the same time be a ‘site’ for bodily inscription—and a vehicle capable of ‘restating’ figural presence in the cosmos—is explored alongside the historical connection between early printmaking and engraving on metal, and the reciprocal act of making a print.  If Memory/History and Bayeux Soldats are the emotional pulse of the exhibition, Body Armour/ Char Corps is its theoretical pumping heart.

On ANZAC Day all over Australia, in even the smallest towns, a sacred ritual is enacted by bands of returned soldiers and witnessed by countless faithful. Frail old men weighed down by a beribboned array of medals at their breast assemble at war memorials to utter ‘Lest We Forget’ and to place flower wreaths in memory of their dead comrades. Heads are bowed in silence as The Last Post rings out, and during that pregnant minute, individual hearts and minds flow and weave around the potent refrain as each remembers or imagines the past.

Not being born until 1951, I think of the Australian war cemetery near Villers-Brettoneux in France that I visited with a group of students from Fintona Girls School seventeen years ago. One moment we were singing along to the radio in the warm bus, and in the next we were thrust into the chilly morning air of the soldiers’ cemetery. For some of us, the experience was the most confronting of our lives; we solemnly laid a bouquet of red gladioli on the memorial steps and in stunned silence walked through row upon row of white crosses, deeply shocked that so many Australian boys lay there so far from home. The word sacrifice took on a new meaning. Back on the bus, a brooding female collective moved through tilled brown fields and misty rain to the next destination; perhaps the students thought of their brothers, but hopefully they also thought about history and their place in it.

Much of Raymond Arnold’s Memory/History inspiration came from the artist’s walking tours of the battlefields of World War One, where his great-grandfather, William Hancock had fought in the AIF alongside thousands of other Australians between 1914 and 1918. During 1997 Arnold camped by historic sites, recorded material in his sketchbook, and visited war museums and cemeteries at Pozières, La Boiselle, Le Hamel and Péronne, and as he went, he reflected on his own life and those who had died: ‘ I felt my apparent state would strike any farmer or villager with the feeling that I was one of them returning to the battlefield – a ghost figure! This feeling became more accentuated as I literally walked into a major ceremony to inaugurate a new memorial to Australian soldiers near Le Hamel. I was an outsider amongst French villagers, politicians, clergy and young Australian soldiers. I had walked through a deserted valley, crossed an overgrown old French line to come across this throng…I was taken by the number and scale of the floral tributes lying amongst the assembled crowd. I made some drawings, took some photographs and these depicted wreath motifs became the basis of my new body of work.’

On ANZAC Day I also think of my own family lore, as told by the fire late at night by my mother; how my teetotaller grandmother and her two daughters moved from Coburg to Hamilton to be safer while her husband went off to the Second World War, how my 15 year old mother rode her bike to work in flax fields surrounding the town, how my nana made my mother an elegant white wool coat out of a blanket. There was no talk by my father of the war back then, only the presence of souvenir-trophies on the wireless sideboard: my grandmother’s sweetheart Fred (who, alas, married another) had brought back a deep blue satin cloth with thick gold fringing, a worn marble carving of the Sphinx and an engraved dagger in a jewelled sheath from the First World War.

My father, William John (Jack) Campbell, who enlisted on the 25 April 1942, became a Pilot Officer in the Royal Australian Air Force, training as a gunner and radio operator. He returned home with tiny snaps of snow-covered Canadian mountains, a newspaper photograph cutting of him in uniform dancing with a starlet in a New York nightclub and a log book filled with night missions over France. But memories of desperately pushing his best friend’s intestines back into his body to no avail in a Mitchell bomber during a fearful battle lasted longer, and he suffered a lifetime of war neurosis (and a broken marriage). I can still hear the dreadful cries and moans that disturbed his sleep into old age.

In the summer of 1997 Raymond Arnold visited the Historial de la Grande Guerre museum in Péronne, France. While viewing the display of machine guns, rifles and trench mortars from WW I, he came across a ‘tunic-waistcoat’ of dark suiting fabric and pin-striped silk, armoured on the front with a solid but flexible screen of square metal plates. It was labelled ‘Abdominal protection for a British soldier’. Although Arnold was struck by the odd combination of businessman-like formality and armoured protection (for the costume seemed both pathetically vulnerable and touchingly homespun) he also realised that the vest would have been a powerful talisman for the wearer—in battle this symbol of enduring family love, hearth and home could stir the courage of a lion and make the soldier feel truly invincible.

Recently, at the War Memorial in Canberra, a sound and light show of a Second World War air attack gave me some idea of what my father had experienced in battle, but it was a diorama of a seated wireless operator mannequin facing his station which allowed me to stand right behind the figure’s shoulder, that was the most powerful evocation of the real. Not only could I say to myself—my father wore gloves just like these, leather jacket, flying cap, boots, all just like these—but I could also imagine his fear as he sat in that tiny vibrating space in the bitter cold and dark, and as a gunner, calling ‘Left–left–mind the flak’ as he waited to be blown to bits like his friend.

Arnold stitched small squares of cheap lace material together to suggest the Péronne vest in the Memory/History’s Body Armour/Char Corps print. The copperplate was aligned with a perforated zinc plate of cross motifs to metaphorically integrate an individual figure into the body of the army/corps:

‘The folding of the figure into the ground is a singular pictorial strategy which I carried on from the ‘And For Each Sense…’ series of prints, and it mirrors a multiple, if not infinite, series of personal catastrophes.’ The dual mirror format, which suggests the images can turn in on themselves, like bodies being folded into the earth, is a significant theoretical and emotional device. Early on Arnold noted that paper being peeled from an inked copperplate fascinatingly mirrored the plate image. The artist harnessed this effect in Memory/History and built on it, re-using plates twice for repeated effects, and in the later Henri and Bayeux Soldat series, created composite images from two plates, based on twinned figure and ground relationships. All series take on dual French and English titles, as befits the artist’s peripatetic ‘post-modern’ existence in two hemispheres. This life has allowed Arnold to braid himself into the work, so in France, a place where he has no real roots, and where he can be anything, the artist virtually becomes his subjects, like Kafka’s beetle; he is in turn Henri IV, the soldier ghosts and the Bayeux soldiers.

When Raymond Arnold showed me a WW I tunic in the Australian War Memorial covered in dried mud on the same day as my encounter with the radio operator mannequin, again I experienced something powerful. In this case, the Somme soil, that is, the landscape itself, was adhered to the already poignant coat. What had its wearer seen and experienced to be covered by so much caked earth? Had he died in battle? Or did he survive the war and keep the jacket as a reminder of his good fortune and his comrades’ sacrifices?

‘ The embroidered images of Norman knights in the Bayeux Tapestry museum are duplicated and amplified by a cavalcade of soldier mannequins at the D-Day museum nearby. My small two-plate images are drawn in situ in the WW 2 museum and the larger two-plate etchings are subsequently developed from these initial investigations over time at my Paris workbench. This method of precedence or notation, anticipating a type of construction, underpins my strategy. The museum sourced small image precedes and is, in turn, amplified by the physicality of ink and paper of the larger printed sheet. This transition confirms an exchange where the image could be said to be ‘morphing’ or folding back into materiality – back into the object!’

Home from Canberra, I take Arnold’s Bayeux Soldat V print from the drawer, remove the tissue and look at the image of the life–sized soldier’s chest, aware that it mirrors my own beating one. The torso is a kind of stage, and the rich and lively interplay of buckles, buttons, metal rings, shoulder straps and flourishes of cloth are like melodramatic actions in an operatic tragedy; the frenzy all at once highlights the discomfort of soldiers as walking targets and harnessed mules — full of outward bravado and inward fear — and the futility of armour and cloth as bodily protection. I think of the function of skin as a divider of zones—just as delicate surface tension separates sky and water, so too does the barrier of flesh contain our bodies and separate our inner body from our outer. The disarray of the kit that lies upon the soldier’s skin in one sphere is echoed by the warm, tangled entrails, heart and lungs attached inside the body in another.

In the months that follow, I collect photographs from The Age of American and Australian soldiers in Iraq. I fold the images so that only the torso remains, to see if they resemble Arnold’s soldiers. They do.

‘In this talismatic projection of line and pattern into sheet/shield I am interested in protection. I am ‘weaving’ to develop, in a Tolkien sense, the mythryl, protecting armour. Today’s Australian newspaper tells me that Australian soldiers will be in Iraq at least until late next year. My work seeks to make identification with them and in its broadest ‘wishful thinking’ sense has ambitions to protect them.’

Katherine McDonald
©2007

go to | Raymond's Exhibition