Linda Finn. War Letters Project

     Linda Finn. War Letters Project (At the Timber Village Museum, Blind River, 2 November 2013 to 20 January 2014.)
     Linda Finn’s grandmother Essie Sann wrote letters to soldiers during World War One, and again during World War Two. She saved many of the letters written back to her. Linda Finn has created a number of pieces using scans of some of these letters along with found objects, parts of uniforms, scans of photographs, and abstract and realistic images. These items are layered onto painted or monoprinted backgrounds, some have translucent layers of paint added, and Finn incorporates one of her favourite media, hand-cast paper layers or pieces into several of the pieces. Finn is nothing if not inventive in her use and melding of media.
     She also has a gift for design, and knows how to use limited palettes. Visually, all these pieces are interesting, most are engaging, and a few are stunning. I especially liked Requiem and When Words Are Not Enough. Requiem shows the life-size outline of a dead soldier over blotches of red, ochre, and mud, with the pieces of a uniform glued onto the base of raw canvas. I don’t know why this picture is so powerful, perhaps it’s the dead soldier, whose image hovers at the edge of visual awareness while we focus on the details of the background and overlays. Words consists of digital images of dozens of letters glued onto the canvas, with a life-size soldier overlaid on it. The letters are almost all legible, here and there the smudge of the soldier’s figure hides the words like a scorch mark.
      Also impressive is War Marked the Landscape Like Language, in which Finn has placed twigs painted black onto small wooden plaques arranged on short ledges. Anyone who has seen images of the World War battlefields will recognise the allusions. Seeing so many miniature trees shattered by shellfire lined up in rows and columns emphasises their calligraphic qualities. The title is apt; the language of war is destruction and death.
     A very moving exhibit is a suitcase containing stories and reminiscences told by the relatives of the dead, along with some photos and drawings, which the viewer is invited to pick up and read. I had time to read only one, a daughter’s account of how she yearned to have known her father, who died when she was three, and who knew her only as a two month-old baby. She keeps his portrait on her bedside table still.
     These are art works with intended meanings and significance. The fashion for many decades has been for supposedly pure art, which at most expressed the maker’s individual responses to the world, or recorded the artist’s exploration of his or her visual dialect. But even these meanings were politely ignored: what was supposed to matter was the design, the palette, the dialogue with similar and contrary styles, the demonstration of how the new visual dialect could be used.
     But the making of artworks that made a public statement never went away. In the second half of the 20th century, the comment was as often as not satirical, ironic, or self-deprecating; or too solemnly serious to be taken seriously. The work of people like General Idea almost apologises for having ideas, and ideas about politics and culture at that. Their in-your-face commentary made them seem somewhat indecent.
     The kind of comment Finn offers, straightforward invitations to think and feel about what it means to know about and be linked with people in the viewer’s personal and collective past, that was largely left to the makers of greeting-card verse and calendar art. Linda Finn shows us that questions raised by memory are serious, not only for the viewer’s sense of his or her own past, but also for our collective understanding of our shared history. Memories are too important for sentimentality. Her work is about war, and the sacrifices that we offer to the god of war; but it is not a glorification of war. In this, it is a welcome counter to the current jingoism. Highly recommended. ****
     Disclosure: we own one of the works in this series, it is part of this exhibition.
Read the report in Standard, or go to the Museum's Facebook page.