DIANA THORNEYCROFT - Statement (The Canadiana Martyrdom Series)

Several years ago a friend gave me a book called Torment in Art which chronicles paintings of Christian martyrs undergoing barbaric executions. As someone who has alluded to the presence of pain in past work, I felt a certain kinship with the artists who depicted these grim spectacles, and decided to produce a suite of images based on the content found in the book. Using the paintings as templates, I made photographic replicas of the same saints suffering their martyrdom. In my photographs, however, dolls and not humans are being "tortured", and subsequently the level of intensity - and certainly the seriousness of the crime is reduced. Despite the attention to detail, I am conscious that the images are somewhat goofy; the clothing is crudely made and often ill-fitting, the gestures of the dolls stiff and awkward and the landscapes artificial. These scenes are obviously staged, as is the infliction of pain they depict. The preposterousness of plastic figurines maiming each other introduced a slightly black kind of humour and the semblance of child's play.

The last image I did for that series (which was included in the installation Martyrs Murder) was an image entitled The Martyrdom of St. Nicholas. In this photograph I no longer used an existing painting as a template. The image depicts Santa Claus on a crucifix in an idyllic Canadian winter landscape. In the foreground there is a cross country skier who appears to have "stumbled" upon the scene. Half hidden in the snow are two rabbits in their white winter fur, and stuck into the snow in between a fir tree and the crucifix is a pair of snow shoes. As there is no historical narrative that goes along with this image, the reading of it is much less fixed and I hope, a bit more humourous.

The ideas contained within The Martyrdom of St. Nicholas brought me to a new body of work, which I am calling The Canadiana Martyrdom Series. My strategy for these photographs is to use paraphernalia that is quintessentially Canadian: landscapes obtained from calendars and tourism posters (eg. panoramic vistas of the Rockies or the wheat fields of Saskatchewan), Canadian "icons" like Anne of Green Gables, the RCMP, hockey players and Bob and Doug MacKenzie, and animals associated with the north, such as polar bears, elk, moose, beavers and howling wolves. The photographs still depict spectacles of violence; martyrs continue to die, and the audience, both animal and human, still bear witness to the crimes being committed, but the narratives, now absurdly "Canadiana", are more ambiguous and layered than previous work. The content no longer refers to specific Christian martyrs but to tourism, national identity, Canadian culture and industry. The work also addresses issues about apathy (how life goes on despite the violence around us), and the way in which murder is used as a form of entertainment (for eg. the popularity of CSI). I'm also curious how humour functions when it comes to images of human suffering, and whether it is possible to "make real" the torture of plastic dolls.