We all know the PINS War is between the Protestant new order in the North and the Catholic old order in the South and is played out in a fictional eighteenth-century. But if you don’t like war – and who does – there are a number of potential escape routes from the Garden where The War takes place. Below are some visual clues for those escape routes. You can make, and photocopy your own, of course. And you can find further clues here, too.
A photograph of a photocopy, coloured with colour pencils, showing a drawing from a photograph, of the curator’s Great Uncle Lawrence, on his mother’s side (East Lancashire), who was a “very nice, kind man.” That is all we know. He escaped into his own world, and from the rest of us too, due to his early death. Try not to escape like Great Uncle Lawrence. The other two slippery, bowler hatted characters are Newts.
A photograph of a photocopy on pink paper of a drawing by the curator in 2B pencil of Russian prisioners of war in Germany. The (striking) image is taken from a small privately published book called, ‘Fotograaf in Krijgsgevangenschap Duitsland 1943-1945’ by Dick van Maarseveen, a Dutch POW. The curator picked it up for 50 guilder cents in 2001. Think about this image when you think of escaping The War.
A photograph of a mind drawing of a a Tragic Figure from the 1920s, probably Isadora Duncan. The curator once saw a silent film about her being strangled by her own scarf in her car. Duncan holds a bronze mask, probably of Agamemnon, another artefact that fascinated the curator as a boy. The Duke of Wellington appears as a sphinx. Escaping the War can often be a discomboulating experience.
A photograph of a photocopy, coloured with colour pencils, showing a drawing from a photograph of the curator wearing his father’s Heworth Colliery Band cap, and banging a drum. The curator was escaping The War by clambering onto the coal bunker. The curator couldn’t help but bring notice to his sitation by banging his toy drum. The figure to the left of the curator is that of his brother, from a slightly later date. His brother was an expert at escape in the late 1970s.
