Research - Jeremy Deller

Research – Jeremy Deller

Jeremy Deller is a Turner prize winning British artist who deals mostly with British cultural and political issues such as the 1984 Miner’s Strike and the Battle of the Somme.

Looking at Deller’s work, you can see he has an affliction for the complexities and intricacies of modern British culture. In his book ‘Folk Archive’, he travelled to differing parts of England and documented varying cultural events, from the soundsystems of Notting Hill Carnival to Tar Barrel Rolling in Devon. The book highlights the everyday creativity and cultural richness of the British people not always seen in mainstream media channels. A noted ability of Deller’s is his skill to blend into each chosen environment and provide the viewer an intimate vision without it seeming exploitative or too much as an outsider looking in.

The work of Deller’s that relates mostly to our project is one of his more recent experiments. On the centenary of the Battle of Somme, The 1^st of July 2016, Jeremy Deller hired non-professional performers ‘including social workers, farmers, security guards, farmers, shop assistants, students, labourers, flight attendants and schoolboys’ (The Guardian, 2016) to silently perform as soldiers from the Battle, in multiple scenes across the UK, such as travelling on the tube, marching through Manchester Piccadilly and gathering on the steps of the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow. The extraordinary scenes created a stark juxtaposition between contemporary Britain and the turmoil of WW1.