Interpreting the Ypres landscape of war by plein air painting: Arts-based enquiry

Dr. Bird received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Institutional Grant to fund an artist’s participation in the film: Ways We Remember War.

War art has a long history of rendering depictions of battlefields, seminal moments, and people caught in the conflict, either soldiers or civilians. This project of this project is to travel to Ypres, Belgium in Spring, 2022, with a landscape artist to paint ‘plein air’ the sites of memory that are part of Canada’s heritage. It will echo the efforts of Canadian war artists that engaged in similar approach over hundred years ago and provide new insight into how we make meaning of these places. The output will be a film produced for the July 2023 centenary of the unveiling of the Brooding Soldier National Memorial.

This funding covered the costs for one artist, Jeremy Herndl, to travel to Belgium with Geoffrey Bird. Jeremy produced two plein-air paintings of sites of memory. He was filmed as he painted, and his narration and paintings formed part of the film, Ways We Remember War. This effort provided a lens for the audience to engage with the landscape of the First World War in the present.