The Individual Remains - Untold Stories of the First World War
- Date
- Monday 27 October - Saturday 20 December, 2014
The Individual Remains - Untold Stories of the First World War is a new exhibition organised in honour of the Centenary of WW1.
This new display in the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery has been curated by students from the MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies course, at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds.
The industrialized nature of the First World War is often defined by the scale of human casualty and loss. This quantification, although significant, only serves to present each soldier as one of many, void of personality and distinct experiences. Using the Liddle Collection, held at The University of Leeds, this exhibition brings to light individual soldier’s voices and wishes to re-approach the narrative of the First World War; through reclaimed and re-purposed objects, personal diaries and pictures. Through these we see the embodied authorship within the objects displayed as a direct response to the conditions of war and the legacies that remain.
The exhibition includes letters from and to the troops, photographs, medals and servicemen’s artwork. Together, they tell the different stories of the conflict, from underage soldiers to conscientious objectors and the Christmas truce of 1914.
A brooch crafted from a piece of human thigh bone is among one of the ‘trench art’ items selected for the exhibition. Little is known about this rather macabre piece of jewellery. It was made from a piece of Sergeant Thomas Kitching’s thigh bone — shattered when wounded on the Somme on 7 July 1916 — and is thought to have been given to his sweetheart, Lizzie Hunter. See here for more information.
The exhibition runs from Monday 27 October to Saturday 20 December 2014. For more information visit the Gallery website or contact the Gallery directly by telephone: 0113 3432778 or email: gallery@leeds.ac.uk
Photographs by Lieutenant Robert. C. Perry, from Perry, Book of Signs and Wonders: Photographs of the Western Front, date unknown. With kind permission of the University of Leeds Special Collections.