The context

Wilfred Owen, British soldier and poet, was killed on November 4th on the Sambre Canal which passes through the village of Ors. Still relatively unknown in France, he is nevertheless considered in Britain as a fundamental "witness" of the First World War, of which his texts and correspondence underline the "barbaric absurdity".
Having noticed that a great number of British visitors came looking for Owen's tomb and asking to visit the cellar of the Forester's house, the Mayor of Ors began to becAme interested in Wilfred Owen. An association of the Friends of Wilfred Owen existed in England so a branch of the association was created in France. A small group was created to work on the memory of Wilfred Owen : they built a small monument and organised different events to pay tribute to the poet.

The Wilfred Owen group wanted to do more than simply pay tribute to the poet, and decided to initiate an art project to commemorate on the one hand the last moments of the man, soldier and poet, and on the other hand the contemporary and universal nature of his work.

The commission

The house where Wilfred Owen spent his last night has been transformed in an artwork in itself. It stands out like a ‘bleached bone’ against the dark forest. The roof has been altered in order to look like open book, face down with spine uppermost, the ‘pages’ constructed out of glass to let a maximum of daylight into the space.
The central idea is to create a sanctuary away from the outside world. The inside is therefore gutted, leaving an open white space, lit from above. The interior of the house is clad with a translucent skin of glass onto which are etched drafts of Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth. Poems are projected in sequence into the four walls, with translations in French.
The cellar remains untouched and is accessed by a curved ramp alongside which runs the text of Owen’s last letter home to his mother.

The artist

Simon Patterson (b 1967, England) plays with metaphors. Working across a wide variety of media, including painting, sculpture, film and architectural projects, the artist co-ops the presentational capacities of trusted representations of information, from the underground map to the periodic table, from type-writers to electrical circuits, subverting their claim to certainty, by replacing the names of tube stations, electrical breakers, chemicals, or letters of the alphabet with the names of musicians, movies stars, or the kings and queens of England.