Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 53

in an effort to afford some protection against an increasingly successful
German U-Boat campaign. The artist Norman Wilkinson is credited with
‘inventing’ the technique, which involved covering ships in strong optical
designs and bold colour contrasts.
In researching the technique, Phillips was immediately drawn to a photograph
of the studio established in London’s Royal Academy to generate designs for
ships. Almost everyone in the image is a woman. While the role of women in
the Second World War is quite widely documented, the history of women in
the First World War is still largely untold. This despite the fact that, as part
of the war e ort, women regularly took up roles which had traditionally been
the preserve of men, working, for example, as tram drivers, telegraphists and
dazzle designers.
Phillips has covered the entire surface of the MV Fingal with a bold gestural
design characteristic of her practice based in printmaking – indeed, the
design is a reworked and enlarged version of a screen-printed scarf the artist
made in ����. Overlaid on the surface of the design, at the ship’s stern, is
a message in Morse Code, which reads: Every Woman a Signal Tower. The
text reworks the title of James Spratt’s The Homograph or Every Man a Signal
Tower, first published in ����, in which the author described how with a
simple handkerchief, anyone could use their body to transmit messages
across long distances.
Ciara Phillips’ Every Woman signals a different form for the monument
– a monument which is not about preserving for posterity the inspired
invention of a single individual, but which reflects on the collective and
largely unacknowledged endeavours of women in the First World War. Every
Woman is a clarion call, a plea to embody and keep alive memory through
our actions and thinking. A reminder that the female body is no cipher for
externally imposed ideals, but a bearer of its own unique messages. Then
and now, every woman, Phillips reminds us, has something to signal.
52
Scan here to watch a timelapse video of Ciara Phillips’
Every Woman
http://bit.ly/2izMcxe