Portfolio
19240
The Somme 19240 was a large-scale artwork representing each of the 19,240 commonwealth soldiers who died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme on the 1st July, 1916. Each soldier is represented by a 12 inch figure, wrapped and bound in a hand-stitched shroud and arranged in rows on the ground. The purpose of the work is to physicalise the number – to illustrate the enormity of the horror which unfolded and the loss of life. It is easy to say the number but almost impossible now, 100 years on, to imagine the physical reality of the bodies and the impact that these deaths had on the friends and families of these individual soldiers or collectively, upon our society as a whole.
the Trench
'The most remarkable First World War commemoration you will ever see.”
– Dan Snow
The Trench presents the figures from the Shrouds of the Somme in a different format: as a mass rather than as individuals. The structure is designed to curve round so that once you are inside it, you cannot see a way out. When the figures where laid out as the Shrouds of the Somme, they represented the individuals – but The Trench – presented the viewer with a more unsettling image.
SHROUDS OF THE SOMME
Of the 19,240 allied soldiers that fell on the first day of the Somme, some 12,000 were never found. In total the bodies of 72,396 British servicemen (and South African infantrymen) were never recovered from the battlefields. Once the Somme 19240 project was complete Rob felt compelled to represent all of the soldiers whose remains still lay in distant fields. He continued working to create an additional 60,000 shrouded figures to add to 12,000 of the 19,240 figures so that each of the 72,396 soldiers that were lost during the battle would be remembered
