Dancing in the Rain
Amongst my late parents’ snapshots are a number of photographs taken during the cataclysmic years of World War Two; happy, lighthearted pictures of my father and other young men.
Dad was 24 when he was evacuated from Dunkirk. He was sent to Africa, India & Egypt, he was part of the Chindits, a special force who fought behind enemy lines in Burma (now Myanmar). He rarely spoke about his experiences in the conflict but he once told me how he had danced in the tropical rain to cool off.
But his wartime photographs don’t show the horror he must have experienced. I think the impossible, he was a soldier, a man who was trained to fight and kill.
Using altered contemporary imagery and archival material my series ‘Dancing in the Rain’ reimagines the experience of landing in an unknown landscape and a world irrevocably changed. A place and time where nothing is what it seems, just like dad’s photos.
