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Visions
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Camouflage tree (Baumbeobachter, circa 1917)
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The orchard (part one)
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Man is a part of nature
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Clothed in nature
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The orchard (part three)
Christopher Down
Visions from Arcadia
Exploring the role of fiction as a tool to unlock and confront the traumatic, I worked over the course of a year with a group of servicemen as they prepared for, became engaged in and subsequently returned from a tour of duty.
By depicting these men alone, enveloped by a vision of Virgil's Arcadia, they seem to step outside of the theatre of war and its potential trauma, into a fictional refuge. Here they are free to surrender to nature and contemplation. Yet, despite the perceived Edenic tranquility there is a sense that something is wrong, for there remains ingrained within this landscape an echo from the histories of war.