Tomb (2013), Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, France
A temporary art installation created whilst artist-in-residence at France's leading World War I museum. Approximately 18,000 soldier-shaped biscuits were stacked in the form of the Stone of Remembrance 'altar' designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and found in Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries. The sculpture explores the 'consumption' of martial sacrifice in conflict, national identities, and the materiality and ephemerality of memory.
In memoriam: The present and the absent (2013)
An essay in the Tomb exhibition catalogue reflecting upon and contextualising Kingsley Baird’s artwork at the Historial de la Grande Guerre. Tomb is a ‘New Memorial Forms’ project, in which the artist critiques orthodox notions of a 'memorial' by challenging fixity of meaning and conventional perceptions of physical permanence. Other catalogue contributors are leading World War I historians Jay Winter and Annette Becker, who write about Tomb in the context of an international discourse of remembrance.
Patterns of ambivalence: The space between memory
and form (2011), book chapter in Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form: Sighting Memory (Routledge)
The chapter discusses the role of artist, viewer, and site in the construction of meaning in relation to The Cloak of Peace (2006), Kingsley Baird’s commissioned sculpture in Nagasaki Peace Park, Japan.
Serve: a new recipe for sacrifice (2010), National Army Museum,
New Zealand
Serve comprised two works, Picnic and Serve, exploring and conflating secular and spiritual themes including military sacrifice and remembrance rituals in the context of national (Anzac) mythology and identity, and individual and collective remembrance and redemption.
