It was never the plan, but having worked for more than four years now on the legacy of the First World War in our project, An Unknown Soldier, we were keen to create a considered commemoration of this Centenary year, 2014.
Grand Eagle (capitals and columns) is a civic-sized quotation from An Unknown Soldier. The main text is our soldier’s own paradoxical definition of humanity “Able damned est/ N thing worth saving/ N harvest thrives/ On our mass graving.” Beneath we have chosen an epitaph from Preparatory Oratory “MCMXIV fire guns at a useless trajectory MMXIV”, screenprinted in gold.
The enlarged capitals, as found in medieval manuscripts, spell out ANNO to remind us of the centenary year, but also suggest capital cities found on a map of the world, surrounded by fortifications in the shape of each sentence, or perhaps columns of soldiers marching towards the sump that forms the gutter of a trench, or the vanishing point of no-man’s land.
