Upon a visit to the ‘Lincolnshire Life Museum’ the underlying theme of our piece appeared to be edited. We were struck by one fact displayed on a board, which sparked the theme of our piece not to be changed, but updated. The fact stated was that ‘Nine thousand Lincolnshire men died in the Great War.’ This statistic resonated with us as a group, although we had been attached and moved by the tale of the Beechey Brothers, we wanted to represent that moving story, but not detract from the sheer amount of lives lost of local men, which we were unaware of. We found ourselves at a cross roads where it appeared we could either pick the personal, infamous story of a mothers loss of 5 sons or focus on the 9 thousand lives lost, we decided not to dismiss either ideas and show both. We wanted to do this in a simplicity way of physically showing nine thousand lives and then also telling the story of the Beechey Brothers. We found an area of The Grandstand, which we felt we could hold an instillation piece in which we could represent the 9 thousand local lives lost. We chose an outside patch which was boarded by a white fence, which we knew to be the ‘ parade ring’ we felt this prominent as we were showing the lives like the horses would have been shown in previous times. By physically having the piece on the earth outside The Grandstand; which was uneven due to the trenches that had been built at a time when the grandstand had been used for military purposes, we felt it created a more honest and authentic piece. The idea of placing something on the ground in which the said men would have walked and trained made the link between the site and our work ever more prominent and reflective.
We noted this meant we would be subject on the day of performance to the elements, we had rehearsals in the snow and severe worry of windy conditions which mean the positioning of the pennies were crucial to hold down the string that would mark our piece. The environment might oblige you to respond in a certain ways, prefiguring the performance.’(( Pearson Mike, 2010, Site Specific Performance, London: Palgrave Macmillian.))
The idea of using an item or fact to represent the lives lost we found as a medium to link our previous work and our new inspiration, we felt the stories, letters and art work which we had discovered in our research still needed to be staged in some form; so we developed the idea of an installation piece. We decided to use nine thousand ‘something’s’ to create a piece of artwork we had found in our research. A Lincolnshire Solider had created the artwork in the trenches. We wanted an item that was small enough for us to replicate this piece of art by filling it or outlining using all nine thousand of the ‘something’s’. After research we found an instillation piece by the practioneer John Newling. His most recent work focused on the growing of plants and fruit in urban and religious locations. He states on his blog when commenting on his 2013 piece Ecologies of value ‘The first section of the exhibition plays with ideas relating to money and religion.’ ((http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/art/john-newling-0)) In his exhibition he displayed 50,000 two-piece pennies in a church. This lead us to the notion of look at the value of 1 pennies, the idea of money in an environment which took thousands of bets each race, seemed to link directly to The Grandstand on that level. We also found placing the pennies on the earth caused them to be uneven due to the marks left by tracks of previous tanks and trenches making the reality of the situation and lives lost come to the fore front of our and the audiences mind when replicating the art piece. The coins not only link to the betting side of the Grandstand, but also the constant theme of worth, the worth of the almost retired building, the worth of a life, the self explainary worth of currency, which in todays economical climate regularly fluxgates. We want the process of creating the piece to be interactive and for the audience to place a penny on the art work fully aware it represents one life, it makes the connection personal as well as expressing the magnitude of life’s lost.