Two new artists’ books by Mick McGraw are on show with associated artefacts:

Lilia
The Roman occupation of the UK and Scotland has intrigued me for many years, particularly their ingenuity in infrastructure and the defensive mechanisms they employed.

The Romans remarkable skills in civil engineering plotted the perfect routes to navigate the topography of our country, using these to mobilise troops to the front lines of conflict and invasion. Subsequent generations benefitted from this infrastructure and built upon this expertise with many of our current roads constructed on top of these historical routes.

In order to control this movement of people, particularly to protect the invaders from attack, the Romans used the natural geography and topography to their advantage. The Antonine Wall was constructed around AD 142 and stretched between Old Kilpatrick on the banks of the river Clyde in the west, to the River Forth in Bo’ness in the east, providing a continuous barrier to halt the movement of people across the Central Belt of Scotland.

The land between the two major rivers formed a natural point for the Romans to control movement and trade. The wall had many forts and surveillance points along its route and was protected by many forms of defence, ramparts and ditches. ‘Lilia’ were groups of deep defensive pits, dug in the ground and filled with sharpened stakes. They took their name from their resemblance to lily ponds. These pits, arranged in a quincunx pattern (akin to a chessboard) would be camouflaged by branches and undergrowth, waiting to impale any invaders from the Caledonian tribes before they could reach the ramparts of the wall.

Bang, bang, you’re dead
Another war, different technology, same outcome. More media information and de-sensitisation of the viewer, where we are slowly subjected to witness the atrocities of war, death, displacement, famine.

The title comes from children’s games when I was growing up, 70’s tv showing a mixture of Cold War news and cowboy films.

Taken from mainstream television news broadcasts, unedited drone pictures of a direct missile strike on a truck-mounted rocket launcher show the instant of detonation.

The book is based upon a short news broadcast on primetime television. I have made a number of works where I examine this de-sensitisation of our awareness of information. I first started drawing the shapes of scene of crime tents from news broadcasts. These would be used to cover up a sensitive situation or scene of crime, protecting the site itself from outside interference but also shielding the scene from our gaze.

Over a short period of time, news channels have pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable to broadcast. A bomb in a street in London showed horses injured by the blast, but no images of human trauma shown. Soon after, another blast in another country showed the crime scene covered with a tent but evidence of human trauma was broadcast; shoes blown off in the blast were visible outside of the covered area. The timeline moves on, another scene of devastation. The tent is in place again but now we witness a human leg protruding from the tent’s side.

Fast forward again and now, on a daily basis, we witness human remains broadcast at all times of the day, faces blurred but clearly in the aftermath of a catastrophic incident, life extinct.

Bang, bang, you’re dead captures the scene of a live assault. Whilst we do not see the occupants, we quite clearly understand the outcome.

To view more works by Mick McGraw, visit his website.

This exhibition is open to the public Monday – Friday 9am-5pm. No booking needed. The library is on the first floor of B block. Public parking on meters on main road or at Ashton Court.

For more information on Bower Ashton Library, visitor access and campus map, see the library website. You can also follow the library’s Twitter feed.

UWE Bristol, City Campus at Bower Ashton, Kennel Lodge Road, Bristol BS3 2JT.