| Geoff Hocking |
|
GEOFF HOCKING has several very successful books for The Five Mile Press including Signs of the Times, Eureka, Gold, and The Rebel Chorus. He has also illustrated many of our other books. As an artist, Geoff Hocking created the installation One Million Human Beings, One Million Bombs as a response to the number of American soldiers being killed in Iraq. ‘I thought, how can you visualise this? So I’ve created a book with a million small human beings in it, and it represents a million people killed in war – and on the floor of the gallery, there are 140 books which represents the total number killed in the 20th century.’ The books are accompanied by some of the iconic photographs of war. ‘Amazingly enough, a lot of people win awards for taking photographs of people in terrible trauma. Photographers in war serve a purpose. I guess these people are doing a service to all of us in one way, of saying “this is the reality of humankind” – but in another way, they must feel like I feel with this exhibition.’ ‘You’ve got to remove yourself from that and say, “I’m an observer, but not an innocent observer. So much of this is done in my name, regardless of whether I approve of it or not…in a way, this is a protest against what is happening, because I actually don’t agree that I want it to be done in my name any more.”’ From this installation, Geoff Hocking has created the book One Million Human Beings (Publication November 2007). Using the device of a constantly repeating symbol across the page, the book documents in ascending numerical order the number of lives lost in wars in the 20th Century. There are 10,000 symbols per page each representing a human life. Text boxes across the page contain statistics on the numbers of dead, and the war zone. The symbols add up to one million by the end of the book. Mathematically multiplying this by 140 we arrive at the estimated total number of deaths through war in the 20th Century. The book is regularly interspersed with iconic images, paintings, photographs, poems, phrases and songs which create a feeling of relentlessness and create a very unique design.
A portion of the proceeds from the sale of One Million Humans will go the No More Landmines Trust. |
