This was a two year commission to coincide with the series of World War One commemorative events planned by Dover Museums and Arts Group (DMAG). The project was to highlight the impact on the local environment and community and its legacy of World War One by working with the community and local museums. The project was also to help raise the profile of the museum and its heritage to new audiences.
The commission was working with Sandwich Museum, creating a physical and digital resource, based on their World War One collections. It also created an online presence through the use of digital cataloguing systems, and a less object-based approach to communicating about the collections.
This also lead to interactive drawing and making workshops, within the community and schools highlighting the museum and the legacy of World War One but also as a research mechanism to ascertain how McDonald's target audience absorbs information to learn.
Through the workshops and McDonald’s extensive research with the museum's archivist and consultation with the stakeholders he focused his solutions in generating a pictorial narrative, in which the audience would respond and relate to.
McDonald combined both photographic references of the horror of the war to drawn illustrated images of a more personal nature from the direct account of the local soldiers.
He constructed the book through extensive experimentation in print process, generating complex compositional structures, over laying image over image to create a timeline. Tableaux images create a visual representation of the expendable soldiers’ lives as an allegory of pawns in a game. Graphic motifs and images occur throughout expressing the futility of the repeating battles and the war itself, juxtaposed against that of the ongoing life in Kent. This was the underlying message that both McDonald and the stakeholders wished to communicate.
The large scale book and prints are in situ in the museum acting as as an educational tool as well as a contemporary artefact.
