As a boy and hungry, I would ask my step-mother what it was that we were having for dinner. She often replied that today it was ‘air pie and windy custard.’
I later discovered that this meant that we were having nothing and I always remember drawing parallels between this and the amount of affection that she deposited onto my sister and I. We who were not of her womb. Her own children, it appeared, needed our share too.
A recent stay as a guest in Gloucester Royal Hospital, where I ate very little for my duration, for some reason reminded me of that time when I was 7 or 8 years old, living at my father’s house in West Ewell and did, however, inspire me to produce this collection of artworks.
The hospital, the doctors and the nurses have played their integral part in the History of our country and of our Culture and Heritage. From the Carry On films that wonderfully reflected contemporary society, to the humour of the newspaper jokes and as far back as I can remember to my precious Ladybird Books, the ideology of the National Health Service in its totality has always remained prevalent.
I also wanted to continue my interest into the Knights of Old and the Knights Templar. The image of the Knight has become for me a symbol and a metaphor for Honour, Courage, Loyalty, Discipline, Myth, Legend; all those characteristics that I believed once resided in British Society and made Britain ‘Great’- but that now seems to have ebbed away with the tide, leaving a kind of ‘adolescent out-of-work sludge’ around our coastline. I still find it fascinating that the EDL use the Knights Templar iconography as their motifs, suggesting that Britain should be for the British, whilst throwing the swastika into the mix to produce, what I fear is an extremist and warped sense of reason and vision.
In these works then we see the images of British hospital wards, many military wards, mostly historical, where the victims of battle earn their rest, but over-shadowed and belittled by pieces of pipes and wires and sockets and dirt, adding to their insignificance as their faces drain further away down our timeline.
Juxtaposed in these settings are the Knights, the good guys, the emblem of ‘All Righteousness,’ but it is they who roam the wards, reared up on horseback, axe at hand, sword at the ready, making the final kill to those brave men whom fought for their country and given only a bed, a course sheet and a thin blanket in return. They now become our soft government who holds the NHS purse strings, dictating how and when we are to get well, how many nicotine patches are too be handed out around the cardiology ward, how many foreign tourists they will allow to be cured before they actually consider their own people. More disturbing then are the children’s wards; they who know no better, are not responsible for this financial catastrophe and insult to the British people, but slain in the same way by these images and symbols of ‘good-be knights.’
As always the imagery is multi-Layered, fundamentally ridiculous, perfectly poignant, disturbing yet compelling, angry and laughable in my efforts to suggest not only a feeling of national pride, a need and a want to be British, but also a sense of my Love and Hate for our beautiful island; to reproduce my abstract vision of my England, record and document my short stay here and in turn, flip the coin of discourse.
Mark S. Masters