Chloe Dewe Mathews is a photographic artist from St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex. She studied an Art and Design Foundation course at Camberwell Art College, London and then went on to study a BA degree and a Masters degree in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford University. Before she decided she wanted to focus solely on photography she worked in the feature film industry.
Her project “Shot at Dawn” is a project commissioned by the School of Art at Oxford University where she studied as part of their 14-18 NOW, WW1 Centenary Art Commissions. It’s based on visiting the different sites the British, French and German were executed for different behaviours during World War One. The project consists of twenty three images all taken at different locations where the individuals were held before their execution. All the images were taken as close to the exact time of the execution as possible and as close to the same time as year. Before creating the images Dewe Mathews researched the cases which meant “trawling through courts-martial documents, using old aerial photographs and monastery diaries to pinpoint the precise locations where each man was executed.” With the help of academics, military experts, museum curators and local historians they helped her work. “By photographing them, Dewe Mathews is reinserting the individual into that space, stamping their presence back onto the land, so that their histories are not forgotten.”
All the images are shot either in Britain, France or Germany and each image has the name of the soldiers that sadly lost their lives in the description of the image.
This image above really stood out to me because all of the other images were in fields or on the street but this one meant that Private Herbert Chase was killed against a brick wall.
I have connected a lot to this project that Mathews has done because of how much emotion it holds. Although this project to Chloe and myself has no personal connection it has a personal connection to someone but not only this she is connected to the sites of memory of the past of all of us.
In conclusion this research has really opened my eyes to what happened in the past before I was born and even during my lifetime that I never even knew about. The artists have all influenced me in their own way. Sally Waterman the most because of the connection she has with her images. I feel I have connected a lot more with her images than most people because of the experiences we have both experienced in our lifetime. Chino Otsuka has inspired me because of the way she has created a project talking to her younger self. Finally Chloe Dewe Mathews has inspired me because of the sites of memory she revisited. She bought a lot of emotion into her work because of the small elements she added to the images and the work. By adding the names and the places of where the soldiers passed it made me connect with the images a lot more. Each artist in there own way have inspired me to add different elements of each of their work into my work to make it more personal to myself.
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