First Welsh exhibition of work by two war and conflict artists

Published 25 January 2012

The ice-white walls of the Art Central gallery in Barry are being transformed into a testament to man’s cruelty against man, for the Blue Line exhibition, which marks Holocaust Memorial Day.

War and conflict artists Nicola Tucker and Maciej Hoffman took time out from hanging and constructing their works at the town’s King Square building to explain the concept behind the exhibition and how they came to their topic.

Cardiff-based Tucker and Hoffman have already taken the exhibition on tour in Hoffman’s native Poland and will continue to London after their stint in Barry.

In Invasion of Space, Tucker suspends a bullet in mid-air. The ordnance was pulled from the body of an Eritrean man, shot for smuggling victims of war across minefields.

A new installation, Red Tape, has been constructed specifically for the Barry exhibition, and is a stark comment on the bureaucracy employed by corporate powers, which sometimes prevents action in the wake of human disasters.

The 40-year-old mum of two said: "In this exhibition, we’re not attempting to be beautiful. We’re trying to engage contemplative thought."

Her piece, Triptych, is a frame welded from cold, hard steel bars, and hanging as though in mid-air, against a black backdrop and hidden behind a diaphanous cloak of gold. Step inside the work to experience the crushing restriction of the steel, the window dressing of the scores of noble campaigns embarked upon in the name of religion.

Tucker, whose family hails from Abertillery is not only an artist. She is a mediator and advisor on Holocaust issues as well as a teacher. But her experiences in helping the victims of conflict in North Africa certainly inform her art.

She is one of those rare breed of people-of-conscience, who has been prompted to fly halfway across the world and help those in crisis.

Her work in Eritrea and Somalia with victims of landmines there, earned her the respect of the Foreign Legion and a Medal for Bravery.

What differentiates between those who choose to help someone in distress and those who walk on by?

"Fear," said Nicola Tucker. "I had been teaching English as a foreign language to people in the Somali community in Cardiff and heard about this guy who had been shot and was still trying to smuggle people(in particular orphaned children) across the border to safety with a bullet still in his body.

"He could hardly walk. Amazing man. This is really a life or death situation; he choose to save lives not just his own. From speaking with him I knew he wanted to attain some balance in his life.

"I took a bit of money out of the bank and went to help. I couldn’t not get involved. But it’s not bravery. I managed to get a well-respected orthopaedic surgeon David Jenkins, in Cardiff’s Bupa hospital to operate and remove the bullet as well as fixing his crushed ankle. He waived the fee for this treatment."

Tucker’s own early trauma of a life-changing leg injury at the age of two, with years of unsuccessful skin-grafting surgery and nearly eight years in a wheelchair, leading to amputation at the age of nine, could give an indication of the apparently fearless individual whose installations examine the embroilment of religion with war.

She said: "I’ve seen people with terrible injuries and I think in the context of my own injury, ‘it’s just a leg."

Journey Line - exhibited at the Chabad centre Oxford University was a result of two encounters; one with a holocaust survivor who Tucker travelled with to Auschwitz and the other a man who, as a four-year-old boy was walking the railway line with his father at Auschwitz, towards an area, where your skills and usefulness to the Nazis would be assessed.

Tucker said: "His father was a sewing machinist but refused to say anything because he didn’t want to serve the Nazis. So he was sent to his death. Those are the sort of choices people are faced with in conflict."

Internationally renowned Maciej Hoffman’s work uses stark colours – mostly black, white and red – on large format canvas to feature haunting images of nameless faces, striped camp uniforms, hints of barbed wire.

The subjects’ features are half-obscured, sometimes defaced; rendering them without identity, as would have happened to them in the WWII concentration camps and the cattle trucks which transported them there.

Hoffman’s work has changed from creating computer art and advertising with an artists’ collective in a post-communist age to the prolifically-created vision of the worst of the human condition. The married father of two, 47, has returned to the traditional oil on canvas technique he once eschewed.

"When we started out, this technology was new and exciting," he said. "Not many people were doing it.

"I believed that traditional techniques and the profession of an artist were heading for extinction.

"But I realised new technologies could not replace old ones, in terms of expressing human emotion.

"Painting has absorbed me and I am constantly at work."

Blue Line is due to open on January 24 and will run until February 25.

For information visit the Blue Line exhibition page.