Photo essay: Sensing memory

Voice in stone

While writing this essay, I recalled the afternoon of 12 November 2004, the day following the burial of the unknown warrior at the National War Memorial in Wellington (Figure 1). The unidentified New Zealand soldier, killed in France in 1917, had recently been disinterred from his grave on the Western Front and returned to his homeland for burial. When I visited the new tomb, the solitude was a striking contrast to the previous day when a multitude had thronged around its low form, throwing red artificial poppies and natural flowers onto the warrior’s casket.

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Figure 1.

Kingsley Baird Design Team. Tomb of the Unknown Warrior (2004). Bronze, granite, marble, pounamu (New Zealand jade). National War Memorial, Wellington, New Zealand. Photograph: Guy Robinson.

Inscribed as a “wreath” in the Maori and English languages on the black granite, sky-facing surface of the Tomb, is an entreaty calling the unknown warrior back to his distant homeland in New Zealand. The origin of the words is oral, that of a karanga or Maori ritual call. ²

In my imagination, I can hear a voice, uttered in a tongue that is not my own. Strong, clear, sustained notes:

Te mamae nei a te pouri nui

(The great pain we feel)

Tenei ra e te tau

(Is for you who were our future)

Aue hoki mai ra ki te kainga tuturu

(Come back return home)

E tatari atu nei ki a koutou

(We have waited for you)

Nga tau roa

(Through the long years)

I ngaro atu ai te aroha

(You were away sorrow)

E ngau kino nei i ahau aue taukuri e

(aches within me).

At the end of the last line, “aue taukuri e,” that phrase the dictionary describes as an “exclamation of distress,” the voice trails off, carried away—I always imagine—by the wind. ³

Close your eyes and gently run your fingertips across the granite surface. First, you will feel the smooth texture of the highly polished stone and then the karanga inscription abraded by sand grains forced through a fine nozzle at the pressure of 100 pounds/in². The edges of the letters are not those of a smooth, chiseled font (Figure 2). Their rough texture imitates the artist’s freehand, flowing script transferred from an original in charcoal on coarse-tooth paper. The depth of the words diminishes gradually toward the end of each line until the letters are felt only by the most sensitive touch. In the rain and also at some angles in sunlight, the text—particularly that which is shallower—disappears. The intention is to capture in stone the “memory” of sacrifice as well as some semblance of the transitory sound of the human voice projected from the lips of the female kai karanga or caller.

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Figure 2.

Kingsley Baird Design Team. Tomb of the Unknown Warrior (2004). Bronze, granite, marble, pounamu (New Zealand jade). National War Memorial, Wellington, New Zealand. Detail: text sandblasted in granite. Photograph: Kingsley Baird.

Patterns of light and ambivalence

On my way from Tokyo to Nagasaki for a site visit to the city’s Peace Park, where the sculpture I was commissioned to design would be erected, I alighted from the train for a brief stop in Hiroshima. There, in the Peace Memorial Museum, I came across a color photograph of a woman sitting facing away from the viewer, her naked back “branded” with a black, cross-hatch pattern. ⁴ When the atomic bomb was dropped on 6 August 1945, the resultant heat rays burnt the dark pattern of her kimono into her skin.

The following year, the stainless steel sculpture I designed of a stylized traditional Maori cloak—a gift of friendship from New Zealand to the people of Nagasaki—was erected in the city’s Peace Park. The Cloak of Peace’s curved form is intended to create an “arena of exchange” by “inviting” visitor engagement (Figure 3). ⁵ For those moments when the sun is shining at the optimal angle, the bodies of visitors standing within the cloak’s “embrace” will be “branded” by its projected perforated pattern, a native New Zealand flower motif. The sculpture explores the sensual capacity of objects to evoke memories through the facilitation of human interaction. It is intended as both an expression of consolation, protection, and solidarity for the inhabitants of Nagasaki as well as to bear witness to unresolved events of the past. It is this past that I asked poet Jenny Bornholdt to capture in a poem commissioned for the Cloak. Above the sculpture’s flower-patterned form is a “collar” containing a poem in English, Japanese, and Maori. The cut-out lettering, through which foliage, sky, and the rebuilt city are visible, reads:

REMEMBER WINTER. SPRING’S WELCOME CONSOLATION

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Figure 3.

Kingsley Baird. The Cloak of Peace. 2006. Stainless steel, Nagasaki Peace Park, Japan. Detail: Jenny Bornholdt poem. Poem typography: Annette O’Sullivan. Photograph: Kingsley Baird.

In Nagasaki, after the unveiling ceremony, when the mayor and officials had departed, a New Zealander living in Japan asked if she could take a photo of me with The Cloak of Peace. As I stood in front of the sculpture’s form, the projected flower pattern seemed to penetrate my woolen suit and cotton shirt to my skin (Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

Kingsley Baird. The Cloak of Peace (2006). Stainless steel, Nagasaki Peace Park, Japan. Detail: kowhai flower pattern. Photograph: Catherine O’Connell.

Taste of sacrifice—ephemeral memorial made of soldier biscuits

Over 10 days in 2014 at Dresden’s Militärhistorisches Museum, in full public view, I built the Stela memorial, which consisted of 18,000 Anzac-recipe biscuits formed in the shapes of soldiers from both sides of the First World War (Figure 5). ⁶ The materiality of the biscuits was important. While they were fragile and their freshness relatively short-lived, the sensory experiences they evoked endures: the sight of the stacked biscuits en masse; the characteristic, rough texture of rolled oats and desiccated coconut; the taste sweetened by golden syrup; and the crunching sound during consumption. Many visitors commented they could smell the biscuits before they entered the large gallery in which Stela was displayed. Museum staff remarked the aroma lingered long after the artwork had disappeared.

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Figure 5.

Kingsley Baird. Stela (2014). Militärhistorisches Museum, Dresden, Germany. Detail: soldier biscuits and oak leaf pattern. Photograph: Kingsley Baird.

I cannot control what will stimulate memories to rise to the surface. So strong are some associations that the image of biscuit figures lying in an oven before or after baking evokes impressions of the mass destruction of human beings. The Stela project in Dresden was concerned with remembering sacrifice but also complicity. Death camp ovens, a German military museum, and a city in which many inhabitants were burnt to death are inevitably conflated.

As with the Tomb and The Cloak of Peace, public participation in the act of remembrance was key. On completion of the memorial, museum visitors were invited to eat the biscuits. This ambivalent act—one of destruction (of the physical memorial) and construction (of the soldiers’ memory)—was intended to reveal the responsibility and complicity of individual citizens in the human cost of war while also being a gesture of remembrance. By eating the biscuits, my hope was that the soldiers’ sacrifice might be recalled and memory symbolically ingested (Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

Kingsley Baird. Stela (2014). Militärhistorisches Museum, Dresden, Germany. Photograph: Kingsley Baird.