Transcript from interview with Henny Burnett on working processes in her latest project 'Local National Memory – Local Stories
:A key process to my making is casting, and casting objects. I will gather objects, in the whole process of it, and then I won’t just use the objects per se I will actually cast from them. And this I’ll either do by using latex and making a mould from the actual physical objects and then casting from them, or a very very simple process of just sticking the objects into clay and casting from that. Or else I will make in clay my own version of it and then make a mould from that and cast it either in plaster or in wax.
Getting from a cast object to the ultimate outcome which has to be digital, so a flat image, I will set up my various objects into still lifes, which are referring and telling a kind of story around the diary extracts. It is very key that they are then photographed in a particular way. For me the very key part is physically making the objects and lighting them because the whole way they are lit will give a particular quality and effect in the final two dimensional image
National Memory – Local Stories video segment transcript: Artist Henny Burnett on Experience
Burnett:The kind of work I do is assemblage and collage, casting. My work is about memory and histories and stories. So I’ve done a lot of work around my own family and more recently I have been working with museums and their collections and the stories behind them.The work I’m producing for this project is a series of postcards and the starting point is five objects that I have kind of pinpointed from the collection in the Rifles museum. The initial one, kind of trying to find my hook to expand from, was a very small embroidered postcard and apparently this postcard and other embroideries were done by soldiers when they were convalescing from wounds that they had suffered during the war and then the remit was to use objects from the collection as well as including extracts from the two diaries by Sergeant Mundy and Corporal Couldrey.Being involved with this project has thrown up some new ideas and revealed another kind of side to World War I.
I suppose my preconceptions, all of ours, is, World War I: trenches, mud, gas. And what I have found, I suppose, particularly moving, through the diaries of Mundy and Couldrey, is the kind of personal, very small observations. And there was one in particular – when they had captured the Turkish trenches in Gaza, that the trenches were lined with tiles, they had furniture and the sandbags were made out of fabric, so they were like cushions. And I think it’s that, suddenly, slightly domestic scene, in all this kind of horror and discomfort. I suddenly felt, in this great chasm of time, that I could kind of almost touch these people. That made them more real to me than any of the horror stories, which they do reveal, obviously, in their diaries.