To a death in sweating wakefulness

To a death in sweating wakefulness. is an exhibition by Dawn Cole, Johanna Love, and Monica Petzal. Each artist traces back through their own family archives, German and British, to explore the emotional and physical impact of the conflict during the First and Second World War. All three artists share a fascination with looking back to the impact of war and conflict present in their familial pasts. Each draws on family photographic archives and oral histories to make work that embodies the inescapable emotional and physical uncertainties of living within conflict.

Dawn Cole responds to the experiences of her Great Aunt, a WW1 Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurse who volunteered in September 1915 and was posted to France where she served for the duration of the war. Cole uses both personal archives and further research both in the UK and France. Cole’s works have a strong narrative content and includes print and textiles.

Johanna Love re-examines her grandmother’s experiences of living through the bombing of Hamburg and the areas around Schleswig-Holstein, Germany throughout World War Two. Love draws on both personal archives and the archives at the Imperial War Museum, London to create paradoxical landscape images using printmaking and photography. She is interested in resonant images more akin with the complexities of human experience and perception.

Monica Petzal focuses on her parent’s experience as German Jewish refugees from the Nazis. This work references her father’s profession as a metallurgist, his role in the British war effort and his return to a devastated Germany in 1946 to trade the detritus of war as scrap metal to the USA. It also refers to the bombing of Dresden, her mother’s home city by the Allied air forces. The work is chiefly based on contemporary film and her father’s annotated photos and includes print, painting and found objects.