Mine The Mountain
Nicholas Hedges
Opening Night: Fri 5th March 6 - 8 pm
March 6th to March 19th 2010
"She belongs to that breed which loves mankind but forgets that mankind consists of individual persons”
Adam Czerniakow
The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow
The exhibition, Mine the Mountain, draws upon the artist’s personal experience at sites of historic trauma, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Majdane; Ypres and Verdun, to engage in themes of the past, the present, family history, memory and the anonymous individual in history. This sits alongside an exploration of the notion of the ‘dark tourist’ (the tourist who visits sites of trauma) and the idea of tourism of the self.
Hedges questions whether it is possible to find, amongst the mountain of eradicated people, the individual to whom one might relate? With the exception of a few who wrote about their experiences, all that remains of the dead are mountains of shoes, ash and lists of names. From his own experience of Auschwitz as a tourist, Hedges then sought to become a tourist of his own past as he explores the relationship to the anonymous people he calls his ancestors. Mine succinctly conflates the theme of the First World War with Hedges’ family heritage as he journeys back to the Welsh mines of his family and pays tribute to the miners killed during WWI.
History, for Nicholas Hedges, consists of a series of encounters, as dialogues between the past and present, to encourage people to look at the past through the prism of their own lives in order to create a new history. Hedges presents these encounters in a vivid and veracious way through mixed-media installation.
Nicholas Hedges (b. Oxford, 1971) gained a 2.1 in Fine Art and Art History in 1993 and a Distinction in MA Contemporary Arts in 2008 from Oxford Brookes University.
