Facial recognition
Three artists have combined on a musical and visual work inspired by the pioneering efforts of New Zealand WWI plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillies.
A new orchestral and choral work is inspired by the pioneering face reconstruction efforts of wartime plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillies.
Centenary commemorations of World War I here and elsewhere included art of all kinds, most of it focused on the tragedies and losses of war. After 100 years, the pretence of glorious achievement has been abandoned. As the four years of remembrance come to a close, Face, a new work for orchestra and voices by composer Ross
Harris and poet Vincent O’Sullivan, narrows the focus to a group of survivors who dealt with enduring destruction and loss.
Harris and O’Sullivan have already contributed to our understanding of the horrors of war and the effect on individuals through their opera Brass Poppies and the acclaimed Requiem for the Fallen. Face, however, looks beyond the war years, Harris says, “at the people who had to live on with injury or affliction, mental or physical”.
Face was also inspired by the recent work of Dunedin-based artist and printmaker Barry Cleavin, whose work has occasionally appeared on the covers of O’Sullivan’s poetry books.
“Brutally insistent” is how O’Sullivan describes Cleavin’s Veterans series. “Its concluding image is of the head and shoulders of a soldier wearing a New Zealand officer’s cap, the human features transfigured into an arrangement that fills where a face once existed with a precisely drawn jumble of horses and gun carriages: humanity replaced by military debris.
“I was drawn to this particular image as it seemed to work so exactly in that area of war experience Ross and I were immersed in – not the war dead, but those survivors who carried for the rest of their lives, and for all to see, the marring of appearance, the erosion of personality. Their bodies were used as part of ‘the war machine’, and their damaged features declared, ‘this is what your war gave us’.”
The new work also honours the contribution of pioneering New Zealand surgeon Sir Harold Gillies, who described his practice as “aesthetic reconstructive surgery”. Gillies used a multidisciplinary approach to what he called “a strange new art”, working with dentists and anaesthetists to rebuild the faces of soldiers who had received devastating injuries in WWI.
He set up a special unit, initially at the Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot, and is considered by many to be the
The 30-minute work is structured around an accumulating refrain for chorus, with solo roles for a soldier, his fiancée and the surgeon.