CERAMICS 8. - 'Faded Faces'

This project refers to identity of soldiers represented by so called 'dog tags'. The image below shows a dog tag from World War II. and I found it on the website of The Washington Post:

My idea was to emphasize the fact that there is a human being behind any of these tags and to bring attention specially to those soldiers that went missing during the conflict or were killed without identification. That is why on my dog tags, at the place where usually is written the name of the soldier, I wrote 'unknown', or 'missing'. I also included names of well known European battlefields of World War I. where many of these soldiers were killed or went missing. These words were engraved with a set of rubber stamp alphabet.

I made my dog tags of white porcelaine and on the other side of the tags I painted faces of small boys from old photographs. This should awoke the contrast between the images of innocent children once the soldiers had used to be and the appalling fate that the war arranged for them.

The images below shows the process of making, together with transferring the images and painting them in an old style sepia photography:

Here are the finished tags after firing and with a chain applied. I have glazed some of the tags and some of them have treated by transparent gloss varnish. Since the coat of ceramic glaze turned out to be a bit thick and made the engraved letters hard to read, I prefer to use the varnish instead. The glazed tags are shown on the left and two varnished tags are on the right: