Holocaust Memorial Project

Announced on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, my next big project will honour the victims of the Nazi concentration camps of World War II. Over the last four years I have been developing this idea to create Holocaust memorial artworks with great emotional power, that will stop people in their tracks. In the words of a Jewish artist friend I showed prototypes to:

“It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up”.

 

I need your help to approach survivors and families of survivors and victims to seek their input, thoughts and hopefully their approval for what I am doing. That is the key to me proceeding with the project and so to them I will fully explain my concept. I can’t reveal it to the wider public yet but rather than being large scale impersonal memorials, I envisage small scale, intensely personal artworks that can be installed in public spaces and buildings internationally. They will carry the message to a broader public who might not deliberately seek such things but who will inevitably be hugely moved. Beyond being serene and visually arresting, these they will serve as a warning about rising fascism and antisemitism, reminding people that if they do not remember their history they will be doomed to repeat it.

I will be, in due course, also seeking public and private funding to help with the research and travel costs involved in meeting families and survivors. Eventually I’ll be looking to fund the bronze castings as well. Full accounting will be provided.

If you could possibly help in either way please, please, please get in touch to discuss. And please feel free to share this page to anybody you think might be interested.

My celebrated Great Wall project failed to attract public funding at the outset but I stubbornly continued, knowing  that it would have great social value. It took me five years to create and cost me an estimated £100,000 in time and materials and it nearly broke me. In the end I appealed to my family, friends and fans, raising £14,000 privately to get it finished. I know how much it means to them to have been a part of it, given the decades long impact and reach of that artwork and the personal transformations and social changes it has clearly brought. As the originator of this work I am now involved in medical, scientific and social research, demonstrating the value of what I produced. Without that private funding it would probably never have happened.

See here my legacy of social & political artworks. Because they can take years to produce they don’t come thick and fast but have been a constant in my practice since art school. All my other work helps to fund these, sometimes difficult to realise, projects.

 

email: info@jamiemccartney.com

phone: +44 (0) 7961-338-045