Slice of The Peace; “a single catastrophe…piling wreckage upon wreckage” (Benjamin) 2018

Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s observations on the Angel of History (referencing Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus) “…whose face is turned towards the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet.”

The work takes the form of successive strata of ‘duckboards’, or trench gratings, stacked to a height of seven feet and bound together with Belgian mud. The stack is held between two glass  screens. A green patinated bronze fabric tarpaulin is draped over the top of the work (each aperture in the mesh represents one of the 18 million people killed in this slice of the catastrophe).