New NERAM exhibition honours those who fought in World War I

The new exhibition Salient: Contemporary artists at the Western Front will open at NERAM this Friday evening and it is an opportunity for modern day visitors to reflect upon the impact that the First World War had upon their own communities.

The exhibition will be officially opened by Brad Manera, Senior Historian and Curator at the Anzac Memorial.

“In 2017 almost a century after the guns had fallen silent a group of leading Australian artists visited battlefields across the Western Front and create new works which look back upon the tragic history of these sites as well as the impact of these events upon our history, culture and society,” said Robert Heather, NERAM Art Museum Director.

“Once these sites were the scenes of desperate fighting involving young volunteer troops from Australia and New Zealand slaughtering their German counterparts and being slaughtered in turn in the world’s first real experience of industrialised warfare.

 “Today these battlefields are often serene pastoral scenes with fields of crops and livestock, forests, roads, farmhouses, town and villages with the occasional cemetery or memorial as the only marker that thousands of people died there and the devastation that occurred a century ago,” he said.

“The contrast between the events that happened in these places and their current idyllic landscapes had a strong emotional impact upon all of the artists involved.”

The participating artists Deidre Bean, Harrie Fisher, Paul Ferman, Michelle Hiscock, Ross Laurie, Steve Lopes, Euan MacLeod, Ian Marr, Idris Murphy,  Amanda Penrose Hart, Luke Sciberras and Wendy Sharpe, created new works in response to their experiences of these sites and their history. Each artist has interpreted the events and the experience differently through the works that they have created and Mr Heather said the trip has left an indelible impression upon them.

“The huge numbers of dead and missing, left me, like many others shaking my head with disbelief.” reflected Walcha based artist Ross Laurie.

“Boys from my town, like many other died on these battlefields. How does one paint such a thing?”

The exhibition project follows on from the earlier Your Friend the Enemy residency project at Gallipoli in 2015.

that was initiated by Robert Linnegar from King Street Gallery working with Paul Maneras and became a successful touring exhibition.

“These artists have investigated the lives of ancestors they never knew, some of whom still lie beneath these foreign fields,” said Paul Maneras.

“They viewed these bucolic vistas burdened with the knowledge of the great tragedy that had befallen this land.This exhibition reminds us that the echoes of the Great War generation have not died and that there is always worth in revisiting the places where great deeds were done.”

The national tour of the exhibition will commence with its opening at 6.00pm on the evening of Friday 23 March 2018 at the New England Regional Art Museum in Armidale.