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Islington Tribune - by SIMON WROE
Published: 6 June 2008

David Snoo Wilson with grass he has grown using soil taken from atrocity sites around the world

Garden grass grown from killing fields

EARTH from some of the world’s most notorious killing fields is being used by a Highbury artist to grow garden grass.
David Snoo Wilson, 25, took soil samples from the scenes of more than 20 atrocities – including Hiroshima, Rwanda and Dresden – and cultivated seeds in them.
The sculpture graduate constructed a nursery of the potted grass plants in his studio in Shelford Place after he was inspired by a visit to the Cambodian killing fields four years ago.
David said: “I was very moved by the site. These places have such a strong aura around them. And I wondered: ‘Is it the site, or what we bring to the site?’”
A selection of the grasses from Ypres, Belgium, where 10,000 men were killed by chlorine gas, and Kigliwla in Rwanda, will be on show at the Responses to Conflict and Loss exhibition in the St Pancras Church Crypt on Euston Road, from today (Friday).
Only the soil taken from the site where the gas chambers once stood at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland has failed to yield life.
Other works in the exhibition include a Swiss flag that was lived in – and slowly bled on to – by a performance artist for two weeks, a suicide note, and mobile phone pictures taken from inside a 7/7 bombed Tube train.
Curator Garry Hunter said the aim of the exhibition was catharsis rather than shock tactics, adding: “A lot of the work is very personal.”

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