RJG: Bombardment of the wharf at Piraeus (Variant)

'Drawing with my Father’s Photos' is a series of works by Denise Green where sliced slivers of drawings of meandering, intricate marks intersect black and white wartime photographs. The photographs were found in the artist’s father's wartime album from his service in the Second World War. This series explores the trauma suffered by her father during his wartime experience, a trauma which has filtered down through her family, inevitably absorbing some of it herself. These photographic montages are a melancholic exploration of the continuing grief and aftermath of war, long after the conflict has passed.

In 'RJG: Bombardment of the wharf at Piraeus' includes a photograph (photographer unknown) taken during the Greek campaign, in which Australian, British and New Zealand troops, under the command of the British general, Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, supported Greek forces against the Axis powers, was an ill-planned, disastrous and short campaign. From the outset, the Allied forces were vastly outnumbered and on the first day, the Germans made a devastating air attack on Piraeus. Green’s father captured the devastating effects of the Luftwaffe attack on the port city of Piraeus with his camera. Green’s addition of collaged drawings in this work are in the form of two thin vertical strips that mirror the rising plumes of black smoke. They heighten the apocalyptic vision of the suffocating pall of smoke hanging over the trail of fiery destruction engulfing Piraeus.

The vertical strips of collaged drawings that break up the photographs are a recurring motif in Green’s works. This vertical patterning first appeared in her oeuvre after witnessing the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001 from the window of her New York studio. The visual motif of stripes present in this series of works also suggests that her father’s war time experiences have been passed on, and lies beneath, Green’s own experiences, while at the same time they obscure elements of the photograph to suggest that any understanding of her father’s wartime experience can only be partial.