Part of our history found in French town

The Earth Remembers in Arras

Marian Fountain, sculptor, formerly of Whanganui, has been living and sculpting in Paris since 1991 and was commissioned to design and create the monument The Earth Remembers, dedicated to the New Zealand Tunnellers in Arras, for the centenary there on April 9.
It's now a national monument of France that concerns New Zealanders. Marian says from it people could learn a little bit more about the tunnellers that came from the Whanganui area.

Commissioned by the NZ Lottery Grants Board and the City of Arras, it is dedicated to the memory of the New Zealand Tunnelling Company for their work in the underground quarries of Arras during World War I. The bronze sculpture, 3m by 50m high, represents a section of the Arras quarries carved out by the silhouette of a New Zealand tunneller.
The visitor is invited to go into the space of this man, a symbolic tunnel, pausing to reflect on the tunnellers with the help of excerpts from their letters and depictions of the men.

The viewer is put in the position of the women and families who received these letters and cherished the precious photos. The gaze is drawn to the top of the monument, where an exit is oriented towards the rising sun to evoke the departure of the 24,000 Commonwealth soldiers at dawn on April 9, 1917.

This sculpture also evokes one of the thousands of tombs found in grassed cemeteries in the area, as 300,000 men in total were lost in the conflict. It is a recognition that the people of Arras have lived and grown up on the land which bears the memory of our collective history, and that the graves have been carefully looked after all these years.
Recently, Marian returned to New Zealand where she attended the Soldier Welcome Home on June 28 at the Miners Reflective Area, Gilmour Lake, Waihi, where the town's finished soldier statue was installed. Following a ceremony, the public had the opportunity to meet with Marian and three other artists associated with the Tun Coy (Tunnelling Company) story - Helen Pollock, Tony McNeight and Waihi-based Tun Coy sculptor Nick Brumder. The four artists took part in a panel discussion about their journey with the Tun Coy story.

"Following the recent Arras Battle of Arras commemorations, the Soldier Welcome Home ceremony brings the story of the service of the Tunnellers and those attached to them full circle," says Marian. "The 'coming home' is an important part - it was good to be in Waihi for the ceremony to welcome their soldier home and to be with the local descendants there, and then also in Whanganui.
"Travelling through the country and meeting tunnellers' descendants is helping me to put the monument in its place, because the French memory of WWI is different from ours, and conceiving and making it in France felt like a very long distance away, as those tunnellers would have felt, but for other reasons.
"The feeling I get is that, through these years of WWI centenaries since 2014, people are learning stuff that has been swept under the carpet all these years [the returned men not wanting to talk] and, with incomprehension about the enormity of the tragedy are wanting to fill up the 'gap' with love and a putting to rest.
"I hope that with this notion goes the post-script: NEVER AGAIN."

Marian Fountain grew up in New Zealand with, like any New Zealander, a strong visual contact with Maori art and an acute sensibility towards the mixing of two cultures.
Her family lived in Whanganui from 1967-1978, where her father was principal of Wanganui High School.

At the School of Fine Arts, she learnt the techniques of bronze casting, where she discovered her oracle and means of expression.
She then studied engraving at the Rome Mint, Italy.

Arriving in Europe 25 years ago, the multitude of cultures, styles and eras, consolidated with training at the Rome Mint gave her a foundation and a tool to research a certain essence or universality, hence a period of almost archaeological research, culminating in an exhibition at the Museo Archeologico di Milano, where she exhibited her work in the Etruscan room, proposing a series of objects from a 'yet undiscovered' or 'possible' culture.

In contact with contemporary artists from Eastern Europe during the early 90s, during a series of symposiums organised formally and informally, her work underwent a transformation, and the 'metamorphic' sculptures evolved in direct response to shifting politics and the changed situation for Eastern artists. With her beings in transition she was analysing the actual structure of change.

Since then, her interest has turned towards the scientific realm from which she draws a wealth of inspiration that plunges the spectator into a world of perpetual transformation.
Her work has been exhibited at the British Museum, The National Gallery of Scotland, the Museo Archeologico of Milan, York Museum, Auckland Museum and the French Mint.
Recently her works have been shown in many private locations and public situations: at the Mairie of the 10th Arrondissement, Paris, and in Le Quesnoy in the North of France, for the First World War commemorations: The Land Remembers.

In 2009 she completed a series of bas-reliefs for the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh Hospital, and a bas relief 3.5m wide, will soon be inaugurated as a door of a private home in Montmartre, Paris.
She designed and made the medals for the Commonwealth Games in 1990, America's Cup in 2003, for the "Entente Cordiale" in 2004, and, among others, presentation sculptures and medals for the bar-code company of France, GS1.