The Explosion Museum will be home to new art installation exhibition ‘A Short Fuze’ by artist Helen Snell that will run from June until October amongst the existing gallery displays. Helen Snell has been ‘artist in residence’ at the National Museum of the Royal Navy:
“It is a great privilege to be artist in residence at the National Museum of the Royal Navy and to have access to the extraordinary archives across all of the museums. With each new visit I get a growing sense of the vast and breathtaking scale of the collections that chart such pivotal and diverse moments in our history. Each visit is a journey in its own right. I have been very challenged, humbled and inspired by the things I have seen so far.
I have found the collections at Explosion to be some of the most demanding and sobering of all the museums. It is bewildering to be faced with so much hardware that has been designed, in methodical and chilling detail, to cause death and destruction. Politics aside, these objects ultimately make us question how and why our powers of empathy fail. They symbolise the breakdown of complex systems of communication and diplomacy, which leads to violent conflict. We are reminded of our inadequacies as human beings.
How is it possible to intellectually remove ourselves from the tragic reality of warfare? The saturation media coverage of violent conflict fails to cause the shock and outrage that it should. Do we too easily accept that we need to fight for peace?
In these works I have felt compelled to look behind the sets, props and costumes of “the theatre of war” and to question the sometimes irreconcilable contradictions that shape the call of duty” – Helen Snell
Helen Snell’s work includes intricate paper-cut works that stem from researching in to fascinating subjects, with a range of exhibitions in Wales and Staffordshire already this year. You can find out more about Helen Snell’s work HERE.
(Site specific installation at 20-21 Visual Arts Centre Scunthorpe, photo by Helen Snell)
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