%0 Journal Article
%T Seeking the Shadown of a Dream Grown Vain - Love and Loss in the First World War
%A Sarah Haybittle
%J United Academics Journal of Social Sciences
%D 2011
%I 
%X This paper will discuss how narratives of love and loss in the First World War are expressed through artworks developed as part of my practice-based research, investigating narrative, memory, and story telling. Artistic practice and critical theory are used to explore the creative potential of making the invisible, visual: addressing the ways in which the parallel perspectives of biography, creativity and social history 每 a synthesis of art and society 每 can be developed and maximised for their potential to engage and communicate.Recent work has explored the impacts the First World War had on the women left behind. History documents facts and figures, a representation in the public realm. Soldier＊s lives, rightly, are well documented through books, museums, films, photographs etc. Women＊s experiences of war work 每 nursing, driving, office work etc 每 are also recorded, alongside the broader impacts this work had in changing women＊s role within society, but the undocumented lives of millions of women, who experienced deprivation, fear and loss during the war, remain quiet, more private histories. For every man that died, there was usually a broken hearted woman, devastated by bereavement 每 casualties, whose suffering and loss is excluded from history books 每 narratives of the intangible. Love and loss are explored specifically through the shadow of love. Borrowed memories and gathered biographies recounting the bright hope of sweethearts, blossoming romances, quiet loves, unrealised, and repressed feelings, are captured in composition as visual narratives, and articulated through the symbolic and evocative. These relationships were disrupted by the turmoil of sudden departure to war, absence, fear and often, by life changing loss. Ephemeral tales and fragments act as physical expressions of social history, with embedded trace, absence, and condensations threaded throughout artworks, embodying and evoking qualities of time, space, sensuality, romanticism, and meaning, and are used as a means of documenting, and giving voice to silent histories 每 a mediation between audience and understanding.
%K Visual Narratives
%K Memory
%K Women
%K History
%K World War One
%K Archives
%K Public/Private
%K Love/Loss
%U http://www.united-academics.org/journal/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Article-One-Sarah-Haybittle.pdf