Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
At the Spontaneous Memorials conference at Manchester University a week ago, I was intrigued to hear of an art project that used inks made from the donated flowers that had been left at a spontaneous memorial. Our project used inks made from materials that the parents had gathered from places that were meaningful to them in the context of their grief, and the project that I learned about shared a similar ethos of imbuing the very materials from which the images were made with affective and emotional meaning.
The paper that I listened to was presented by Shannon Blamyres, Curator of Manuscripts at the Alexander Turnbull Library (National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa) and Stephanie Gibson, Curator of New Zealand Histories and Cultures at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand. The paper was titled, ‘Beyond the First Wave: Understanding the Ebb and Flow of Trauma Collection’.
On 15 March 2019, a man carrying semi-automatic weapons entered the Masjid Al-Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand. The gunman killed 51 people and injured another 40. In an instant outpouring of grief, shock and anger spontaneous memorials formed near the sites of the attacks and throughout the rest of the country. Thousands of people visited these sites and left behind artworks, flowers, candles, toys, cards, placards and banners.
Gibson and Blaymires have already written of the work of their two Wellington-based institutions to sensitively document and archive this physical and digital outpouring of national grief, as evidence of what they called the nation’s ‘first wave’ response to the attacks. More specifically, the Alexander Turnbull Library and the Museum of New Zealand (Te Papa) were also invited by Muslim leaders to acquire the hundreds of community tributes that had been left outside the Kilburnie Mosque in the Wellington Islamic Centre.
In the weeks and months following the attacks, staff documented the cityscape in unobtrusive ways, photographing public tributes and vigils and collecting online material in the public domain. No intervention was initially made with the public tributes around the city beyond this recording activity. These collecting activities captured the immediate response and much of what was recorded has either been removed or is no longer visible.
With the Kilburnie Mosque tributes, an early decision was made by Te Papa and the Alexander Turnbull Library to acquire the tributes in their totality to maintain archival integrity. Deselection of items was seen to work against the life force (mauri) of the collection, as well as risking arbitrariness and implying a hierarchy of grief. The approach taken was community driven and curatorially responsible and preserved the representation of voices, faith, community, and forms in response to the event.
In their paper at the conference, Gibson and Blaymires observed that while a growing body of work exists on the immediate collection of materials from spontaneous memorials, there is a significant gap of knowledge relating to the life of these collections after they have been gathered. What does ongoing community engagement with trauma material look like? What roles do the materials play in commemoration, education and healing? And how do institutions ensure that these materials remain active for future generations? What, in other words, does a ‘second wave’ of archiving spontaneous memorials look like?
Of particular interest in the context of the ink-making at the heart of our ‘Losing a Twin at Birth’ project was the Darkness Into Light initiative at the Turanga Christchurch City Libraries, led by community artist Janneth Gil. Under the umbrella of Darkness Into Light, Gil ran the ‘Raising Sakinah: Finding Peace’ initiative, working with women who had lost loved ones in the attacks. ‘Sakinah’ is an Arabic word meaning spirituality, or the peace and consolation of the divine presence, and participants in the workshops responded to this prompt to explore where, or in what, they had found sakinah. Workshops guided them through photography and printmaking techniques, so that the women could produce their own artworks.
Many of the women used photographs of the loved ones they had lost, trees, or the Quran, to express what gave them peace. From these, they made linocut prints using inks made by Gil from the cremated ashes of the floral tributes that had been left at the spontaneous memorials at the Christchurch Botanic Gardens and outside Al Noor Mosque. The idea of making this ink came to Gil when she saw the scale of the flowers that had been left, and Rebecca Parnham, who helped to run the workshops and provided a safe and supportive space for the women, collected the floral tributes for the artist. The ash from the burned flowers provided black, the burned wrapping paper made grey, and the copper florist’s wire provided an intense blue green. Charcoal was also made by burning organic materials donated after the attacks in temperatures above 400C in an oxygen starved environment. Through the use of these hand-made materials, the artworks mixed the women’s grief with the outpouring of community feeling and love.
Alongside the exhibition of the works at the Turanga Christchurch City Library, which coincided with the fourth anniversary of the attacks, Gil also led a Finding Peace badge-making workshop. Here, members of the public wrote messages of peace and made them into a badge, using paper from the thousands of origami cranes left as tributes to the victims of the mosque attacks. Here, too, donated items were repurposed in meaningful ways, to be given back to the community who had donated them in order to amplify and reinforce their message.
Speaking after the paper to the conference organiser, Kostas Arvanitis, he observed that the artistic transformation or repurposing of donated tributes is common to a ‘second wave’ of memorialisation, where there is often uncertainty as to what to do with some of the objects in the longer term and an understandable reluctance to discard them. Kostas cited the example of the Manchester bombings archive, which is held by Manchester Art Gallery; there, candles that had been left as tributes were melted down and reworked by an artist into new memorial candles, which were then given to the families of those who had lost loved ones in the attacks.
The paper highlighted to me the ways in which archiving spontaneous memorials can, with the support of a community artist, offer ongoing support for those who have lost loved ones through the sensitive and creative repurposing of appropriate materials. It also focused my attention once again on the powerful memorial function of hand-making inks from materials with strong affective resonance, such that the colour, texture, and saturation of the inks become as vital as the image, to the meaning of the artwork that is created from them.
Further reading:
Stephanie Gibson and Shannon Blaymires, ‘First Wave Collecting – Christchurch Terror Attacks, 15 March 2019’, The Curator: The Museum Journal 66.2 (2023), pp. 233-55. DOI: 10.111/cura.12451
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