Plastic Armies

As I've stated before, we used to attend my Grandfather's church services from time to time when I was a boy and thinking about this time in my life gave rise to another series of work based around childhood toys. I always thought it strange that in all the boxes of soldiers I played with when I was a boy, there were never any dead or wounded. The soldiers were always in perfect order with full equipment and always on the attack, never with hands raised in surrender or nursing a wound or worse. Of course the poses were sanitised for a young audience but I thought it would be more interesting to use this as a comment on the difference between the glory of going to war and the reality of conflict.
When the 1st World War broke out, young men joined up in their droves. Convinced that it would all be over by Christmas, the new recruits were keen to get over to France in case they missed all the action and the chance to have a go at the Germans. Unfortunately as we all know the initial enthusiasm to fight was quickly replaced with stalemate and slaughter that would drag on for four years. The smart uniforms and shiny boots being replaced with uniforms caked in mud and with afflictions such as trench foot. 
With this in mind I thought it would be interesting to create a series of three dimensional pieces, in the style of 1/35th scale soldiers that illustrate the reality of trench warfare and conflict on the Western Front in general. I wanted to have soldiers in the box that you just wouldn't find in an Airfix box.
These haven't got beyond the drawing stage but the ideas are there. I have bought several model soldier kits to have a go at trying to make these but that's for another day.
The first one sums up the wholesale slaughter on the Western Front on all sides. Instead of pulling a set of figures from the box, the soldiers are represented by the crosses that became the fate of so many of the men.

The Glorious Dead

The B.E.F, 1914

Shellshocked

Lions

Deserter

The Deserter would come with his own wooden post, taut ropes and his last cigarette

 Gassed

The 'Glorious Dead' has become a more painterly piece with the same sentiment behind it.

The Positives and Negatives of War, or the Plusses and Minuses of War

I was playing with a little John Keane-esque gallows humour with the title of this image. The crosses seem to be made up of plus and minus signs joined together and represent the attitude of the commanding officers to the waste of human life needed in order to achieve their goals.
I also have plans to create the boxes for these soldiers in the style of 1970's Airfix kits. I'd like to work out a way in which the shallow cuboids could be reconfigured to make coffin shapes.
There's one image from missing from this series at the moment. It's entitled 'Blown to Buttons' which was a phrase the soldiers used to describe what happened to you if you took a direct hit from a shell. All that was left of you was button sized fragments of skin, bone, uniform etc. My boxed soldier version will reflect this in the size of the pieces of 'bits' attached to the plastic sprues. Not enough to fill a cup.