Empty bullet cases, sterling silver, bronze, laminates, kumihimo braid

Peace Makers (2009)

‘Peace Makers’ confronts the paradox of peace achieved through violence.

I assembled a cluster of empty bullet casings—once vessels of destruction—and reimagined them as carriers of colour, embellishment, and symbolic offering. These hollow forms, like the vacant claw setting at the top—typically used to cradle a gemstone—draw attention to what is missing: the celebration, the resolution, the precious core. Their emptiness becomes a quiet indictment, evoking the absence of peace, the cost of conflict, and the deferred promise of healing.

The work reflects my concern with the fragility of democracy, the manipulation of innocence through propaganda, and our enduring failure to learn from past wars. Drawing on my ongoing inquiry into value and its corruption, Peace Makers reconfigures instruments of harm as objects of reflection and potential transformation. The inclusion of kumihimo braid, historically used in Japanese armour, evokes both protection and ritual, anchoring the work in a lineage of resilience and ceremonial care.

Born in the early fifties into a world still echoing with the trauma of the Second World War, I saw its residue not in battlefields, but in people—in the shell-shocked, the lost, the ones who had slipped through the cracks. They were everywhere and nowhere. Public life moved on, but they remained—unspoken, unprocessed. We were told to rebuild, to look forward. But what happens when you build on unacknowledged trauma?

War doesn’t just destroy bodies. It distorts memory. It rewrites culture. It leaves children without role models, without emotional continuity. I saw what that did. I saw how the absence of care, of reflection, of reckoning, left entire generations adrift. And I saw how quickly the machinery of violence could be reassembled—how fascism, once defeated, could rise again, not in uniforms, but in language, in policy, in public indifference.

The victory of the Allies was never meant to be a pause between wars. It was meant to be a reckoning—a line drawn in history. But we forget. We forget how fascism works: not through sudden takeover, but through erosion. Through the slow normalisation of cruelty, the quiet silencing of dissent, the rebranding of violence as necessity.

I’m not interested in aestheticising violence. I’m interested in what comes after—how we process, how we remember, how we refuse to let trauma be tidied away. My work is a form of resistance to forgetting. It’s a way of holding space for what remains unresolved. The bullet casings in Peace Makers are not decorative. They are indictments. Their emptiness is deliberate. It speaks to the absence of peace, the cost of conflict, the fragility of democracy.

Art, for me, is not a balm. It’s a site of ethical tension. It asks us to look, to feel, to reckon. It refuses closure. It resists simplification. And in that refusal, it becomes a form of care—a way of honouring what has been lost, and what must not be lost again.

We live in a time where forgetting is incentivised—where speed, spectacle, and convenience conspire to erase complexity. But forgetting is not neutral. It is a form of violence. It allows old ideologies to return dressed in new language. It permits the machinery of harm to be reassembled under the guise of progress. And it leaves the most vulnerable—children, the displaced, the grieving—without the cultural scaffolding they need to make sense of their world.

I make work to interrupt that forgetting. Not with answers, but with questions. Not with clarity, but with charge. Peace Makers is one such interruption. It doesn’t resolve the paradox of peace through violence—it holds it. It asks what it means to transform instruments of harm into vessels of reflection. It asks what kind of peace we are willing to settle for, and what kind of peace we might still imagine.

I don’t believe art should soothe. I believe it should stir. It should trouble the surface. It should make space for what has been silenced, misread, or erased. It should honour the complexity of lived experience, especially when that experience resists simplification.

This is not nostalgia. It is vigilance. It is a refusal to let the past be tidied away. It is a commitment to memory—not as archive, but as ethical practice. And it is a belief that art, when made with care and conviction, can help us remember what must not be lost again.