Collaboration with schools & colleges on a programme of art projects and exhibitions all designed to make the WW1 Centenary relevant to today’s young people. Andy worked with art, drama and music students in Leeds, Leamington Spa, Batley, Stafford, Burton upon Trent and Clitheroe.
Somme Centenary Vigil at Clitheroe Castle
1st July 2016. Clitheroe’s vigil was launched at 7-30am by Ribble Valley Mayor Joyce Holgate. The dawn to dusk vigil began with whistles, just as it did 100 years ago when soldiers went “over the top.”
The Response goes Home. An artist’s moving and timely twist on one of Newcastle’s Renwick memorial finds a permanent home in the city, thanks to the Lord Mayor.
The painting shows two contemporary children embracing the soldiers in the memorial as they march off to war.
The painting, done on three wooden boards and measuring nine feet by five feet, was unveiled last year at an event organised by Newcastle Libraries to mark the unveiling of a memorial to 16th Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers.
197 Photographic installation, by Andy Farr taken during the exhibition in the Stewards Gallery at Clitheroe Castle.
Who are the 197?
It is difficult for us to comprehend the scale of the tragedy during the Battle of the Somme. But perhaps when we think of our own children placed in their shoes we can start to understand the sense of loss that would have been felt at that time. Of the Lancashire men who died on that day at least 197 would have enlisted as school children had they been born 100 years later. Three were still only 17 on that fateful day, James Dickinson from Chorley and Thomas Mitchell and Albert Wilson both from Burnley. For most this was their first taste of battle. They had enlisted full of patriotic fervour but now faced death or mutilation in return for a few yards of mud.
For this photo-wall Andy took photographs of young people from schools and youth groups and aged each picture as if it was from the time of the First World War. Each teenager has been labelled with the name of one of the young Lancashire men who died on the first day of the Somme.
Particular thanks to the staff and pupils of Ribblesdale & Bowland High Schools for their enthusiastic cooperation.
Meeting with Coun Stephenson, Lord Mayor. of Newcastle to hand over "The Response" for permanent display in Newcastle Library.
'I died in hell, they called it Passchendaele' Siegfried Sassoon
At 3.50am on 31 July 1917, the Third Battle of Ypres, known as Passchendaele, began when 2,000 Allied guns opened up on German lines. The troops had to advance over ground that rapidly turned into a quagmire, shells having already destroyed the area’s network of drainage ditches. The attacks would continue sporadically, against the advice of those on the ground and often in atrocious weather, until November. Men were repeatedly ordered towards impossible objectives against overwhelming odds, with the result that little was gained at a huge cost. By the end of the three-month long campaign, more than 500,000 men from both sides are thought to have been injured or killed.
“It was mud, mud, everywhere: mud in the trenches, mud in front of the trenches, mud behind the trenches. Every shell hole was a sea of filthy oozing mud. I suppose there is a limit to everything but the mud of Passchendaele – to see men keep on sinking into the slime, dying in the slime – I think it absolutely finished me off” Bombardier JW Palmer
Stretcher-parties wading through the morass sometimes took six hours to bring in casualties.
