Field

Video installation on Lieutenant Buckley's commemorating plaque, showing the artist motionless on the site of Waterloo Battle

On June 19, 1815, at the age of nineteen, Lieutenant Henry Buckley led a charge against a square of infantry on the Plains of Waterloo. Buckley was struck by a musket ball and mortally wounded. The Battle of Waterloo was a one-day action waged on a front of 3.2 square kilometres. After nine hours, 40,000 men and 10,000 horses lay dead or wounded. Each Briton surviving Waterloo was eventually awarded a medal and allowed to count two years of military service for that one day. Men fighting and dying in foreign lands rarely had their bodies returned home: difficulties of transport and practical problems surrounding decay made such journeys undesirable for all but the most wealthy or well-connected of corpses. There are many young Englishmen like Buckley, who are ‘in that rich earth a richer dust concealed; a dust whom England once bore, shaped, made aware’.

Field is a nine-hour projected video timed to coincide with the opening hours of Exhumed, which was staged in the ex-parish church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, where a plaque commemorating Buckley's life sits on a vestibule wall. The film was continously recorded from a point overlooking the location most likely to have been the scene of Buckley’s death and projected onto Buckley's plaque. It is not known where Buckley's body is buried.

Materials:

Projected DVD Video Stream (9 Hours)

---

Share:
Twitter / Facebook / Pinterest