Soap Figures

I had already begun exploring terrorism and remembrance when the Manchester attack happened. It became part of the project: each day, I carved a soap figure, making one for each person who died, including the bomber himself.

I grated the soap left over from carving into a Perspex tub, making one grating for each person killed in terror attacks globally that day. Alongside the sculptures, I recorded the attacks that took place on those days.

On the back of each figure, I stamped the number of people killed globally on the day it was made. These numbers offered a form of identification, but an uncertain one. A death toll alone could not clearly identify a particular day or the people behind it. The repetition pointed to how frequently these events occur.

The Perspex tub was deliberately a “soapbox”: a comment on how these deaths are used to support political arguments and public agendas, before attention moves elsewhere.

Over time, both the figures and the shavings shrank. That disappearance carries a sadness: people whose deaths briefly become the centre of public attention are gradually forgotten. The work holds a tension between the uses made of their deaths and the loss of attention to their individual lives.