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RESEARCH PRODUCT

“Promenade along the coast: Paul Nash and Dave McKean revisit Dymchurch”

subject

description

This paper examines the specificity of the coastline as a natural, cultural and medial boundary and interface. It focuses on how the motif of the coastline is depicted and remediated in the works of English artists Paul Nash and Dave McKean: between 1919 and 1925, as he was coming to terms with the aftermath of the First World War, Nash created a series of pictures depicting Dymchurch on the coast of Kent in England; McKean’s 2016 commemorative graphic novel Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash is a biographical exploration of Nash’s youth, of his experience of the war and of his recovery in the immediate post-war period. The interplay between memories of the trenches and the landscape of the Dymchurch coastline provides striking images that contribute to combining individual and cultural memory, erasure and recovery. This prompts an enquiry into the significance of landscape as medium and “memory-scape”.