Gillian Horne, about my work.......

The Shock of the View
Shrines and memorials; the means by which we remember the dead have always interested me, but this body of work came in response to seeing a young man who had been injured in Afghanistan laying a poppy for a deceased friend, one bitter Armistice Day. Witnessing this grief and damage made me realise that the names on my village War Memorial were real people who had likewise been mourned by their friends and I wanted to extricate them from the list and see them, as they had been almost a century ago when they, their families and friends had been similarly young.
It has been said that the First World War is monumental through the way in which while belonging to a period so distant, it is yet so recent that many of us have close tangible links, through uncles and grandparents. As the research progressed I could link the dead to neighbours I had known for much of my life; tantalising links. Working through census records I also linked family names on the memorial to those grumpy old men and women who spoiled our childhood play, they were the brothers, sisters and wives of the dead, the lucky ones, who had once been young and survived to old age.
The work in this exhibition is devoted to seven men from The Northamptonshire Regiment who died in the early stages of the war when men were still recruited into their local regiment, often with their friends. I concentrated on this regiment because of the proximity of the exhibition to the barracks and the knowledge that it is possible to just about see the barracks and the exhibition simultaneously. I have grown to enjoy the company of these individuals and have in a small way gained an understanding of the effect their loss had upon the village.
Gillian Horne
Much of the initial research for this work was done at the Northampton Records Office and I would like to acknowledge and thank them for their kind permission to use images and text from wartime newspapers.