In Flanders Fields
A Meditation On War

2009 – present
An ongoing installation of etching, sculpture and textiles, film, dance, poetry

The ravages of War, which I witnessed first hand as a child in Europe after World War II, and which I now see in the media as a ghastly array of horrors, have disabused me of sentimental patriotism. In making In Flanders Fields, I add my artist’s voice to the larger conversation on War. I contribute my version of the “scream”, convinced that waging war anywhere on Earth is always and forever wrong and can only perpetuate the delusional psychosis, the farce, and the horror show.

The famous poem, In Flanders Fields, written on a battlefield in Belgium in WWI by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, came to me fully memorized from grade school. (Many people have shared the same.) I adopted it as an emblem of all Wars and took its imagery as a unifying framework for the installation. Lt. Colonel John McCrae’s poignant words ride under and through all that you see here, except when they are the words of 5^th century Greek playwright, Aristophanes. I have imagined McCrae’s dead soldiers engaged in conversation, one that transpires across centuries. They speak with the imperious and witty Lysistrata and her circle of enlightened women who, in their special feminine way, argue for an end to War.

Not a polemic, not a documentary, In Flanders Fields is, for me, symbolic action. If it is possible for a work of art to act as an agent for peace, then that is my hope.

- Fran Bull, Vermont 2016