Think more of perfumed flowers and blossoms bright
And Lilies hallowed in history,
Nature’s profuse embellishment of vines
In flowery gardens, blossom-laden trees,
If earth is right well dunged the rose is red;
Think not about the bodies underneath,
Forget the dead. Weed out your memory.
Weed your memory by Australian war artist George Lambert, ca 1919(ish)
Soldiers in WW1 often wrote about the panacea of wildflowers that seemed miraculously to grow back every spring, dots of color and life in an otherworldly landscape. Wild mustard thrived on the death of the masses, favoring ground where remains rested. Its blooms were used after the war to locate bodies for identification and reinterment - here a mustard bloom, printed in cyanotype to be roughly the size of a male body, is emblazoned with an overlay of a body density map. These gridded maps were generated after the war, the tally of recovered bodies ticked into each 1km x 1km square
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Weed Out Your Memory
Toned cyanotype, linen, embroidery floss, cotton batting
2024
46”x64”