Photo essay: Sensing memory

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1 613976MSS / Memory StudiesBaird research-article2015 Article Photo essay: Sensing memory Kingsley Baird Massey University, New Zealand Memory Studies 2016, Vol. 9(1) The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav DOI: / mss.sagepub.com Abstract This photo essay explores the evocation of memory through sensory stimuli in three of the artist/author s memorial sculptures, both permanent and ephemeral. Keywords Cloak of Peace, memorial, Nagasaki, Stela, Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, Wellington Editors note Wellington-based artist Kingsley Baird is a Professor at Massey University whose continuous investigation of memory and public art has led to participation in numerous international and interdisciplinary design projects. Baird s work as visual artist often looks beyond a strictly cognitive engagement with the past to explore the intersection of sensory experience with memory. In this photo essay, the guest editors of this issue asked Baird to reflect on his use of the material in three of his memorial projects: the bronze and stone Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in New Zealand; The Cloak of Peace, New Zealand s contribution to the Nagasaki Peace Park in Japan; and the ephemeral memorial exhibition Stela at the Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr in Dresden, Germany. All three projects reflected upon in this photo essay share a commitment to material-sensual stimuli that provoke an ethical involvement of the visitor and that challenge our view of memorials as purely visual experiences. This photo essay explores the evocation of memory through sensory stimuli and the material and immaterial qualities in three of my permanent and ephemeral memorial sculptures: Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in New Zealand, The Cloak of Peace in Japan, and Stela in Germany. 1 All require the engagement of human participants for potential meaning to be revealed. Visitors to the sites are invited by the designs of the structures to feel the tomb s text carved in stone, stand inside the form of the cloak, or eat a biscuit from Stela s stacked structure. The ensuing sensations are not hermetic, rather, they are understood in terms of an individual s wider experience, not least evoked by the places in which these memorial forms are encountered: a national war memorial and tomb Corresponding author: Kingsley Baird, School of Art, College of Creative Arts, Massey University, Block 10 (Old Museum Building), Buckle Street, Private Box 756, Wellington 6140, New Zealand. K.W.Baird@massey.ac.nz

2 100 Memory Studies 9(1) Figure 1. Kingsley Baird Design Team. Tomb of the Unknown Warrior (2004). Bronze, granite, marble, pounamu (New Zealand jade). National War Memorial, Wellington, New Zealand. Photograph: Guy Robinson. in which the remains of an unknown soldier are interred, a Peace Park located at ground zero on the site of an atomic bomb blast, and a military museum containing the materiel of war and located in a city rebuilt after the devastation of aerial bombing. Tomb of the Unknown Warrior (New Zealand) Voice in stone While writing this essay, I recalled the afternoon of 12 November 2004, the day following the burial of the unknown warrior at the National War Memorial in Wellington (Figure 1). The unidentified New Zealand soldier, killed in France in 1917, had recently been disinterred from his grave on the Western Front and returned to his homeland for burial. When I visited the new tomb, the solitude was a striking contrast to the previous day when a multitude had thronged around its low form, throwing red artificial poppies and natural flowers onto the warrior s casket. Inscribed as a wreath in the Maori and English languages on the black granite, sky-facing surface of the Tomb, is an entreaty calling the unknown warrior back to his distant homeland in New Zealand. The origin of the words is oral, that of a karanga or Maori ritual call. 2 In my imagination, I can hear a voice, uttered in a tongue that is not my own. Strong, clear, sustained notes: Te mamae nei a te pouri nui (The great pain we feel)

3 Baird 101 Tenei ra e te tau (Is for you who were our future) Aue hoki mai ra ki te kainga tuturu (Come back return home) E tatari atu nei ki a koutou (We have waited for you) Nga tau roa (Through the long years) I ngaro atu ai te aroha (You were away sorrow) E ngau kino nei i ahau aue taukuri e (aches within me). At the end of the last line, aue taukuri e, that phrase the dictionary describes as an exclamation of distress, the voice trails off, carried away I always imagine by the wind. 3 Close your eyes and gently run your fingertips across the granite surface. First, you will feel the smooth texture of the highly polished stone and then the karanga inscription abraded by sand grains forced through a fine nozzle at the pressure of 100 pounds/in 2. The edges of the letters are not those of a smooth, chiseled font (Figure 2). Their rough texture imitates the artist s freehand, flowing script transferred from an original in charcoal on coarse-tooth paper. The depth of the words diminishes gradually toward the end of each line until the letters are felt only by the most sensitive touch. In the rain and also at some angles in sunlight, the text particularly that which is shallower disappears. The intention is to capture in stone the memory of sacrifice as well as some semblance of the transitory sound of the human voice projected from the lips of the female kai karanga or caller. Figure 2. Kingsley Baird Design Team. Tomb of the Unknown Warrior (2004). Bronze, granite, marble, pounamu (New Zealand jade). National War Memorial, Wellington, New Zealand. Detail: text sandblasted in granite. Photograph: Kingsley Baird.

4 102 Memory Studies 9(1) Figure 3. Kingsley Baird. The Cloak of Peace Stainless steel, Nagasaki Peace Park, Japan. Detail: Jenny Bornholdt poem. Poem typography: Annette O Sullivan. Photograph: Kingsley Baird. The Cloak of Peace (Japan) Patterns of light and ambivalence On my way from Tokyo to Nagasaki for a site visit to the city s Peace Park, where the sculpture I was commissioned to design would be erected, I alighted from the train for a brief stop in Hiroshima. There, in the Peace Memorial Museum, I came across a color photograph of a woman sitting facing away from the viewer, her naked back branded with a black, cross-hatch pattern. 4 When the atomic bomb was dropped on 6 August 1945, the resultant heat rays burnt the dark pattern of her kimono into her skin. The following year, the stainless steel sculpture I designed of a stylized traditional Maori cloak a gift of friendship from New Zealand to the people of Nagasaki was erected in the city s Peace Park. The Cloak of Peace s curved form is intended to create an arena of exchange by inviting visitor engagement (Figure 3). 5 For those moments when the sun is shining at the optimal angle, the bodies of visitors standing within the cloak s embrace will be branded by its projected perforated pattern, a native New Zealand flower motif. The sculpture explores the sensual capacity of objects to evoke memories through the facilitation of human interaction. It is intended as both an expression of consolation, protection, and solidarity for the inhabitants of Nagasaki as

5 Baird 103 well as to bear witness to unresolved events of the past. It is this past that I asked poet Jenny Bornholdt to capture in a poem commissioned for the Cloak. Above the sculpture s flowerpatterned form is a collar containing a poem in English, Japanese, and Maori. The cut-out lettering, through which foliage, sky, and the rebuilt city are visible, reads: REMEMBER WINTER. SPRING S WELCOME CONSOLATION In Nagasaki, after the unveiling ceremony, when the mayor and officials had departed, a New Zealander living in Japan asked if she could take a photo of me with The Cloak of Peace. As I stood in front of the sculpture s form, the projected flower pattern seemed to penetrate my woolen suit and cotton shirt to my skin (Figure 4). Figure 4. Kingsley Baird. The Cloak of Peace (2006). Stainless steel, Nagasaki Peace Park, Japan. Detail: kowhai flower pattern. Photograph: Catherine O Connell.

6 104 Memory Studies 9(1) Figure 5. Kingsley Baird. Stela (2014). Militärhistorisches Museum, Dresden, Germany. Detail: soldier biscuits and oak leaf pattern. Photograph: Kingsley Baird. Stela (Germany) Taste of sacrifice ephemeral memorial made of soldier biscuits Over 10 days in 2014 at Dresden s Militärhistorisches Museum, in full public view, I built the Stela memorial, which consisted of 18,000 Anzac-recipe biscuits formed in the shapes of soldiers from both sides of the First World War (Figure 5). 6 The materiality of the biscuits was important. While they were fragile and their freshness relatively short-lived, the sensory experiences they evoked endures: the sight of the stacked biscuits en masse; the characteristic, rough texture of rolled oats and desiccated coconut; the taste sweetened by golden syrup; and the crunching sound during consumption. Many visitors commented they could smell the biscuits before they entered the large gallery in which Stela was displayed. Museum staff remarked the aroma lingered long after the artwork had disappeared. I cannot control what will stimulate memories to rise to the surface. So strong are some associations that the image of biscuit figures lying in an oven before or after baking evokes impressions of the mass destruction of human beings. The Stela project in Dresden was concerned with remembering sacrifice but also complicity. Death camp ovens, a German military museum, and a city in which many inhabitants were burnt to death are inevitably conflated.

7 Baird 105 As with the Tomb and The Cloak of Peace, public participation in the act of remembrance was key. On completion of the memorial, museum visitors were invited to eat the biscuits. This ambivalent act one of destruction (of the physical memorial) and construction (of the soldiers memory) was intended to reveal the responsibility and complicity of individual citizens in the human cost of war while also being a gesture of remembrance. By eating the biscuits, my hope was that the soldiers sacrifice might be recalled and memory symbolically ingested (Figure 6). Figure 6. Kingsley Baird. Stela (2014). Militärhistorisches Museum, Dresden, Germany. Photograph: Kingsley Baird.

8 106 Memory Studies 9(1) Notes 1. For more on these projects, see 2. The karanga or ritual call of welcome was adapted from one printed in Hui: A Study of Maori Ceremonial Gatherings by Anne Salmond (1975). The original was modified to suit the context of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior with the assistance of Allen Wihongi, Hawira Hape, and Hiria Hape (the kai karanga or caller whose rendition of the karanga was recorded). 3. Te Aka Online Māori Dictionary. Available at: e=&proverb=&loan=keywords=taukuri&;search= (accessed 10 June 2015). 4. Photograph: Gonichi Kimura. Kimono Pattern Burned into Skin. (Ujina Branch of Hiroshima First Army Hospital/around 15 August 1945.) Collection of: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. 5. Bourriaud, 2002: 18. For a broader contextualization of this project, see Baird (2011). 6. Stela was, in part, inspired by a mass grave containing the remains of 24,917 soldiers in the Deutsche Soldatenfriedhof (German Soldiers Cemetery) at Langemark in Belgium. For more on the Stela project (in German), see Baird (2014). In New Zealand, the Anzac biscuit is similar to an American cookie. Anzac biscuits are named after the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps formed during the First World War. For the use of Anzac biscuits in other exhibitions, see Baird (2010) and Baird (2013). References Baird K (2010) Serve: a new recipe for sacrifice. In: Chielens P (ed.) Serve: A New Recipe for Sacrifice. Waiouru, New Zealand: National Army Museum, pp Baird K (2011) Patterns of ambivalence: the space between memory and form. In: Demo AT and Vivian B (eds) Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form: Sighting Memory. New York: Routledge, pp Baird K (ed.) (2013) Tomb: Kingsley Baird: Artist in Residence at Historial de la Grande Guerre. Péronne: Historial de la Grande Guerre; Wellington, New Zealand: Massey University, pp Baird K (2014) Stela im Tod sind alle Kameraden [Stela: all are comrades in death]. In: Bauer G, Pieken G and Rogg M (eds) 14 Menschen Krieg. Dresden: Militärhistorisches Museum, pp Bourriaud N (2002) Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les presse du reel. Salmond A (1975) Hui: A Study of Maori Ceremonial Gatherings. Wellington, New Zealand: A.H. & A.W. Reed, p Author biography Kingsley Baird is a visual artist whose work represents a long-standing and continuous engagement with memory and remembrance and loss and reconciliation through making artifacts and writing. Major examples of his work in this field are the New Zealand Memorial in Canberra (2001, with Studio of Pacific Architecture); Tomb of the Unknown Warrior (2004, Wellington, New Zealand); the international Nagasaki Peace Park sculpture, Te Korowai Rangimarie The Cloak of Peace (2006); Tomb (2013) at France s Historial de la Grande Guerre; and Stela (2014) at the Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr in Germany. He is the board chair of War History Heritage Art and Memory (WHAM) Research Network, was the co-convener of Contained Memory Conference 2010, and is the General Editor of Memory Connection journal.