Triptych - each 1m x 45cm
Paper, charcoal and acrylic ; ballot box

This piece was created in response to the violence which erupted over the December elections in Kenya.
Our response to our environment can so often seem justified, but do we really know what impact that has?

All of us have done something which we believed, either correctly or incorrectly, to be right at the time. We respond to our environment in the way we could, the way we know how. So often we don’t realise the impact that this has. Maybe unintentionally we set in motion a chain of events where we impact on others and they in turn respond. The rigged election in Kenya and its ensuing violence was tragic. It is a terrible thing to lose your voice and have an election rigged. Maybe other avenues are exhausted and the frustration level is too high so they respond violently. Maybe that’s justifiable if you know that you will be heard; you are fighting for a cause. But then this in turn displaces other families and leaves their lives in ruins. How will they respond? What will that do to the way the children see their world? Was this the price that just had to be paid for democracy or was there another way? Could you ever take all this into account before you made a stand?

Forgive them (us) father for they (we) know not what we do… 

Selected photos

Greg's talk from the Opening Night. Artists Talk About Their Work.
Wednesday 19 March 2008, 7:00-8:30pm, in the Gallery Space.

Facilitated by Sandra Atkins.

Sandra Atkins: Greg has happily volunteered to go first and share a little bit with us about the process that maybe began the journey of the path that brought this to you, and walk us through to – I won’t say where it’s concluded – but where it might be resting now.

Greg Thornton: I think where Father forgive us started from is one of the few saying I felt . . . where it led to was over the holidays obviously there was quite a lot of violent events that erupted across the world and one of them was in Kenya over the elections, and I guess it kind of struck me that although it was a violent response to somebody feeling like they’d been wrong done it had a lot of flow on effects and I guess it’s a very common theme you see through a lot of violent acts – maybe people look at Ireland as a great example of something that you do to somebody else then goes on to have another impact on someone else further down the road.

This one’s got a huge history and a lot of ethnic violence as well so it makes it very, very complicated. I guess at each point you can stand back and comment or judge on the decisions or the acts that people have done, the violence, the absolute destruction, maybe the fact that in one part the elections were rigged and the effect that that had but then the response that the democratic party, the OD[M] [the Orange Democratic Movement], had to that was horrible, it was killing and destroying peoples livelihoods of those that were largely unaffected and certainly weren’t the ones who were controlling or influencing any of the political process whatsoever.

So innocent people were again getting targeted and their livelihoods destroyed and that then has a flow on effect and I guess with this I was just responding to that in that at each point it has an impact and at each point that person responds in a way that they do their best or they respond in a way that’s natural to them at the time. Whether that’s a good thing or not, I don’t know but I guess it certainly leads a lot to understand where the people have come from, the decisions that they’ve made and forgive them because although what you might be able to take a snapshot of a photo of and say its really quite nasty to go and burn down towns, kill a whole lot of people, throw people out of their homes, all that kind of stuff maybe they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re just responding to what’s happening. Maybe if you understand them a lot more, and where they’re coming from maybe there’s a greater degree of forgiveness that could go into it from us but I would certainly hope it would go into it from a lot of the parties that are tied up in it. It gets nasty pretty quickly and a lot of retribution just spills over I guess in the way in the that we see happening in Iraq is another example where you’ve got a lot of ethnic violence that just continues and keeps escalating, get worse and people lose sight of what originally happened and will hold onto so much previous hurt as a response to what’s happened to them but they don’t really know what they’re doing.

Sandra: Can I ask you about something . . . with something that big, how do you, and how have you, found a personal response . . ?

Greg: I do a lot to try to understand things that have happened or why people do things but I think that also looking at the decisions and the things that I’ve done in the past that I’ve either been proud of or not so proud of, I recognize that I respond very much to what I have in front of me and in hindsight it may be a good or bad response, I don’t know. At the time, I guess you do the best you can to respond positively and to respond in the best way you can but maybe sometimes only time tells whether that’s a good response or whether you’ve gone on to impact others further.

Sandra: Does anyone have any questions they want to ask Greg?

[From the floor]: Is the voting box part of the piece?

Greg: Yes. I guess it’s the idea that being in a triptych, I did the whole lot as one fluid thing then broke it up into pieces and it gets kind of like a movie or a snapshot that this then impacts and it goes on and you’ve got the box, the voting, the democratic process kicked it all off and as a result of that there was violence and the loss of everything and certainly people that don’t know how to respond they have a lot of anger and obviously a lot of contemplation about the best way to respond for the future, and they are working very hard to get some peace but how long that will last for or how satisfying that will be for them . . . I think that at the end of the day every snapshot that happens is quite tragic and it’s a shame that that in many ways the hand gets forced. I guess the fact that all of the destruction to the democratic process in the first place caused so much frustration, so much resentment, and there is so much just under the surface, that although that was a tragic event and the next one was and the next one was the whole thing was avoidable, still those responses were completely understandable within a framework as well . . .

Sandra: Just out of interest, did your understanding of the predicament grow as you …

Greg: Yeah, very much, and it’s very complicated, I think that in many ways the OD[M] were wrong in it, I think that in the actual voting process they won many, the overwhelming majority in parliament, yet he was still not elected . . . was still not elected as the president. And when you look at the figures, and when the official vote counters in one ballot box said that yes there was really one hundred and ten, one hundred and twenty percent of possible voters voted and you start to wonder maybe something happened, so certainly rigging, to a certain degree, and it was not in the representatives in parliament but it was who was to lead the country as the president, and the overwhelming majority is the OD[M], the democratic people in parliament yet their head was excluded through the rigging, so in the violence that ensued they targeted . . . several interviewed out in the slums and said why are you just targeting innocent people, why are you responding violently towards those who actually had nothing to do with the election in the first place. They said a lot of the police come from that ethnic majority that rigged the election, and they are trying to contain it and they do it in a violent manner. That’s one element. And the other element was that they could not get to him, there’s no form of voice I guess, they can’t get a protest to him personally. They figure the only way that he’s going to hear anything is if they get to his people and I guess the violence erupted out of that.

When I was pouring through the stories and the images there were some pretty graphic bits and tragic accounts of the impact of the whole events, the flow on was not nice.