To Forgive the Unforgivable

To Forgive the Unforgivable

To Forgive the Unforgivable

By: Stephen Morris, 2003
Medium: cast bronze
Size: 89 x 69mm
Cast by: Silas Tonks
Issue: The Medal, no. 43 (2003)
Edition: 32

Category:

Stephen Morris was born in Smethwick, Birmingham. He attended Moseley Road Art School, Fircroft College, Marieborgs College, Sweden, and the universities of Cardiff and Leicester. He spent some time in the Royal Air Force as a medic, and was for seventeen years a senior lecturer in an art college, which became a polytechnic, later to become a university. Before and after this he had various other professions, including journalism, social work and social research work. During this time he has published ten books of poetry, one volume of children’s stories and one play. Five of his plays have been produced, and over the years his work has appeared on radio and television. During the last twenty years he has had more than fifty solo exhibitions, and his work has been shown in many group exhibitions. In the 1970s and 1980s Morris gave over one thousand performances of his poetry. From Alaska to Borneo, from San Francisco to Bombay and from Stockholm to Singapore, he underwent tours sponsored by the British Council and various arts associations. His work has appeared in a number of magazines, journals and periodicals, including The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Peace News, Rolling Stone and Twentieth Century Magazine. At one point he was a regular contributor to Tribune, and his visual poetry appeared weekly in The Observer. He has performed his work at literary festivals, universities, folk clubs, arts centres, and in schools and colleges. Over the years he has undertaken a number of Writers in Residences as well as Artist in Residence. In 2001 he was made a companion of the Guild of St George, a society founded by John Ruskin. He now lives in the south of France, where he paints, sculpts, writes, and slowly restores his home in the Midi. The artist writes about To Forgive the Unforgivable, a project that has included paintings, poems, and now his BAMS medal: ‘Some years ago I visited the two camps Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. Even though I had been prepared for the silent horror of it all, I was still shocked. It was perhaps something to do with fear, a lack of comprehension, or not being able to understand what had actually occurred in my own lifetime. It does seem that I have always known what happened in that period of history. The newsreels I saw as a child, when the camps were liberated at the end of the Second World War. The numerous films, such as Judgement at Nuremberg, The Pawnbroker, Sophie’s Choice, and more recently Schindler’s List, as well as the masses of literature I have absorbed on the subject, must all have had their effect. But this enormously successful experiment in mass-extermination, which took place at Auschwitz-Birkenau, evades almost every adjective to describe it. I have tried with words and images to express my feelings, to capture some of the blind terror, the revulsion, and the sheer repugnance of it all and it has been difficult. ‘Above all I have tried to create images that will linger in the memory. All, though, is not hopeless. There is a tomorrow and that may be better. One’s faith in human beings may be shaken but not entirely lost. This episode in the history of mankind should be taken as a warning. We must not forget the evil that man can do and must always be on our guard. ‘It is not for me to tell anyone to forgive the unforgivable. I am not Jewish, nor did I lose anyone, however indirectly. I do, however, feel a great pity and a deep sadness for humanity, mainly for the victims but also in an odd way for the perpetrators. We must never forget the unforgettable for the sake of all those who were consumed in the Holocaust. It is perhaps another cry from the dead to the living; a further plea in the struggle for human rights, for equality, tolerance, liberation and justice. Above all, it is a shout for goodness and decency with which to blow away the black cloud, created by the Holocaust, that still hangs over the twentieth century.’