August Shadows - Reflections on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by Kirk Palmer

About

Kirk Palmer's practice is located somewhere between the still and the moving image. Landscape and sense of place can be seen as broad themes, as can the existential nature of our relationship with the world. Between 2005 and the present he made August Shadows, a trilogy of moving image works - Murmur (2006), Hiroshima (2007) and War's End: An Island Of Remembrance (2012). Centred upon Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Yakushima these works collectively examine how historical events manifest in the present-day physical substance of place, where the pall of the atomic bombings is a latent and unifying presence. Palmer's works avoid didacticism in favour of nuance; they are free from gratuitous imagery of war and its after-effects. Each work is a response to his own personal experiences of these places and landscapes, supported by archival research and the recollections and testimonies of survivors and their families. These events are irresolvable, unfathomable, beyond comprehension; but it is exactly because of these things that Palmer has pursued over a nine year period the awful legacies of nuclear war and its ongoing effects. All his work on the subject of the atomic bombings can be understood as an attempt to 'reach' those particular places in time because as the survivors grow more elderly and frail it is ever more pressing that we do not forget.