The Salient Dead
‘We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together’
History removes man from sites of carnage; death tolls of warfare are reported via the amount of weapons used rather than casualties: ‘They describe the struggle of the tanks, guns, battalions, supplies, barbed wire, divisions. The dead take their place, along with burnt out tanks and empty petrol cans, among the waste material of history’- Gil Elliot, 20th Century Book of the Dead.
The Salient Dead is rendered in earthenware, from the material that is the land we fight over, the land under us at the time of birth which dictates and classifies our rights, yet ultimately unites us in death. It explores a landscape of manmade death that unifies the humanity of the hand with the metamorphosis of man into weapon.
‘This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.’
-T.S. Eliot
