Mission Statement.

My work attempts to address the question of how we might retain our common humanity and our collective memory to set as a light and a defence against the looming darkness.

In his ‘Beyond Vietnam’ speech delivered at the Riverside Baptist Church in April 1967, Dr Martin King Jnr talked of his conversations with those who he described as the ‘desperate’, ‘rejected’ and ‘angry’ young men living in the Northern ghettos of the United States.

“I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve it’s problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first speaking clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today; my own government. For the sake of hundreds and thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”

Exactly one year to the day of delivering his sermon, Dr King was silenced by an assassins bullet.

The final year of his life was an isolated and desperately lonely one following his decision to take a stand against a war which he now clearly linked with the issue of poverty: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death…. there comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

If the speech had left a nation feeling deeply uncomfortable with itself, it had shaken the establishment more so, and thus a prophet’s voice was silenced.

As Martin King was bearing witness to the carnage raging in Vietnam, MIT Professor of Linguistics Noam Chomsky was doing the same in his first book, ‘American Power and the New Mandarins’, published also in 1967. Writing from a place that he has since described as the “Athens of America”, Professor Chomsky spoke of the prevailing “brutal apathy”, and a “moral degeneracy on such a scale that talk about the ‘normal channels’ of political action and protest becomes meaningless or hypocritical. We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the US is dissent or denazification. The question is a debatable one. Reasonable people may differ. The fact that the question is even debatable is a terrifying thing. To me it seems that what is needed is a kind of denazification. What is more, there is no powerful outside force that can call us to account – the change will have to come from within”.

While continuing to consider what our responsibilities might be in recognising our crimes, he writes that while we regret them deeply, we must not “be paralysed by this recognition. Anger, outrage, confessions of overwhelming guilt may be good therapy; they can also become a barrier to effective action, which can always be made to seem immeasurable with the enormity of the crime. Nothing is easier than to adopt a new form of self indulgence, no less debilitating than the old apathy. The danger is substantial. It is hardly a novel insight that confession of guilt can be institutionalised as a technique for evading what must be done. It is even possible to achieve a feeling of satisfaction by contemplating one’s evil nature.”

Today there can be little doubt whether we are staring full into the face of the spiritual death that Dr King warned of, and as a people we are being sorely tested. Our perpetual wars have driven us into a deep economic and moral bankruptcy, and we find ourselves at the end of a ten year orgy of ignoring reality; and as a consequence, of baiting and banishing the voices of truth and reason of our own times whilst rewarding and compensating those who ought rightfully to be serving lengthy prison sentences. There are though no ‘outside forces’ that can bring us to account, and effective action remains our individual and collective responsibility.

When considering the question of whether change is actually possible, we should first remember that change is not only possible but inevitable. The urgent question for us today is what sort of change we demand, and the challenge now for each of us is to examine our role as contributors to the process, and to make those necessary adjustments according to our own conclusions and conscience. In doing so there exists the possibility of contributing towards a common good. Does an artist have the power to change things? Does a preacher or a professor or a plumber? Arundhati Roy suggests a way forward:

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: we be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

Let there be a celebration of all the prophets who dare to speak truth to kings.

May Ayres and Michael Perry

October 2011

God’s Wars. An Exhibition By May Ayres.

“These remarkable works are from the hand of humanity, to humanity itself. Departed, dispatched, or struggling to survive under imposed “freedom.” From earlier duplicities in Central America, to Palestine and Blair’s deviant Christianity. A searing compassion and anger shines from these figures. A wake up call which should be the conscience of nations.”

Felicity Arbuthnot.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26796

“To say that Ayres merits wider recognition is a huge understatement—as far as I know she is completely unrecognised in the art world. She combines superb technique, razor sharp politics and deep human compassion.“

John Molyneaux.

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=26054

“In Bethnal Green there is currently an exhibition of ceramic sculptures by May Ayres which distils the essence of the common experience we are all living through, with a skill and a strength of feeling that makes it impossible to be numbed or indifferent.The peace movement can have no more eloquent a voice than Ayres.”

Victoria Brittain

http://www.cageprisoners.com/our-work/opinion-editorial/item/2180-unforgettable

” I look at your work, and I think of how shallow and safe the work
of so many other artists seems by comparison. You aren’t afraid to touch the
“third rail,” especially in your War of Aggression series, and by “third
rail” I mean those areas in our individual and communal lives that other
artists would not dare to touch for fear of disturbing the status quo,
whatever that might be.”

 George Cappacio.

http://www.mayayres.com

 

God’s Wars.

Selections from the ‘War of Aggression’ Series.

Exhibited in the Belfry of St John on Bethnal Green, London.

September 1 to October 16 2011.

The first four of these pieces are small in size, and were the first to be made in what eventually became the ‘War of Aggression’ series.

Barbarity

Everything, everything in war is barbaric…. But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being. Ellen Keys (1849 -1926)

Ceramic. Length 33cm

‘We think the price is worth It’

Then- Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s quote in 1996, calmly asserting that US policy objectives were worth the sacrifice of half a million Iraqi children.

Ceramic. Height 46cm

A Gentleman’s War

‘We’re the good guys. We are Americans. We are fighting a gentleman’s war here…’

US Lieutenant Colonel Willy Buhl, commanding officer of a marine battalion in Fallujah, 2004

Ceramic. Height: 46cm

Even Children

“Innocent civilians ( in Fallujah) have all the guidance they need as to how they can avoid getting into trouble,”    

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld

We Did Not Know. (What Nobody Could Deny)

The phrase ‘We did not know….’ was once a common saying in Argentina, alluding to the murderous repression carried out by the military junta upon poor and working people attempting to organise during the 1970’s and 1980’s. It is attributed to the Mothers of the Disappeared who gathered together in silent protest while displaying pictures of their abducted sons and daughters.

The Ford Falcon motor car on the column was known and feared as the ‘Death Mobile’ because it was the favoured vehicle of the death squads for snatching people off the streets.

Father Roy Bourgoise who is also present on this work is the founding member of ‘School of Americas Watch’. The School of the Americas is now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Father Bourgoise has been imprisoned countless times for his activism in trying to get the school shut down.

Proconsul. (School of the Americas).

The seated figure is John Negroponte, who enjoys the distinction of having served as US ambassador to Honduras in the 1980’s and again as US ambassador to Iraq following the 2003 invasion. The columns themselves depict victims of empire, mostly unnamed and unknown, but including archbishop Oscar Romero, who was head of the Catholic church in El Salvador until his assassination in 1980. The Catholic church in Latin America at the time had incurred Washington’s wrath for the sin of resurrecting the doctrine of Jesus Christ, namely the ‘preferential option for the poor’.

International demand for export crops had reduced the region’s subsistence farmers to landless rural serfs or economic refugees, drifting into the urban slums.

Romero’s first task upon taking office was to attend to the funerals of those gunned down by troops for protesting a rigged election. Afterwards he decided to sleep at a hospital for the destitute rather than the Episcopal Palace, and ordered his priests to provide sanctuary to those fleeing government forces. These same forces responded by killing Rutilio Grande, a friend of Romero’s; and in a defiant violation of a law requiring government sanction, Romero buried his friend without permission and then excommunicated the assassins. He cancelled Sunday services and instead held a Mass which drew over 100,000 people.

Afterwards, leaflets exhorting the reader to “Be a patriot, kill a priest!” began to circulate, and before long four foreign Jesuits were abducted and murdered, their mutilated bodies dumped across the border in neighbouring Guatemala. Romero himself was gunned down at the altar while conducting Mass, and a quarter of a million people attended his funeral, during which forty people died in a stampede after a bomb exploded. The following two years saw 15% of the country’s population driven into exile, 35,000 murdered and 2000 more disappeared.

The presentation at the back of the piece is dedicated to John Walker Lindh; the first victim of the US torture programme instituted by the White House in 2001. A US citizen himself, Lindh is now serving a twenty year prison sentence for carrying weapons and serving in the Taliban army. Described by his parents as a deeply spiritual person, Lindh became a Muslim at the age of 16, and travelled to Yemen to learn the classical Arabic of the Quran. His studies led him to Pakistan in 2001 where he enrolled in a Quran memorisation school, and from there he travelled to Afghanistan, joining the Afghan army. At that time the Afghan government, the Taliban, was fighting a bloody civil war against the Russian backed Northern Alliance and was receiving US financial support to sustain itself: the last grant of $46 million being made by the US to the Taliban in May of that year. On September 10 John Walker Lindh was a regular soldier fighting for the US backed Afghan government, but on September 11 he became a ‘Taliban terrorist’, and more notoriously, the ‘American Taliban’.

Margaret Hassan also appears on one of the columns. Prior to the 2003 assault on Iraq, as head of the international charity CARE, she travelled from her home in Baghdad to address the British Parliament in London. Referring to the deadly and ongoing sanctions regime she told them: “The Iraqi people are already living through a terrible emergency, they do not have the resources to withstand an additional crisis brought about by military action”. Afterwards she returned to Baghdad where she survived the aerial bombing campaign of ‘Shock and Awe’, only to be kidnapped and murdered the following year. A deeply committed woman who was much loved by the mothers and children of Iraq, her death remains a perplexing mystery.This is compounded by the fact the even the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi condemned the kidnapping and appealed for her safe return.

Another presence is that of Sister Dianne Ortiz, a North American Nun who was abducted on November 2^nd 1989 by the Guatemalan security forces and then subjected to systematic and repeated torture and rape. On Palm Sunday, March 31 1996 she stood in Lafayette Park across the road from the White House where for the first time she was to speak in public about the most harrowing experiences that she had endured:

“Today I begin my silent vigil for truth in front of the White House- not a silence of complicity, but a silence of commemoration for those who have been tortured, assassinated or disappeared in Guatemala in the last thirty years. Our own United States government has been closely linked to the Guatemalan death squads, and has a great deal of detailed information about those of us who have survived as well as those who have perished. We need and demand this information so that we can heal our wounds, bury our dead, and carry on with our lives.”

She continues campaigning to this day.

Ceramic. Height 190 cm

Demonic Principals.

The actions of the US Department of Justice under GW Bush that gave the green light to torture are, or ought to be, well known by now. There are four key documents, all freely available on the internet.

First there is Senate Armed Services Committee Report on Torture. A bipartisan report issued by Carl Levin and John McCain, with no dissenting voices, which describes how torture was introduced and implemented in military strategy.

Second is the International Committee of the Red Cross Report (ICRC) on Torture which summarises the accounts of what happened to the 14 ‘high value’ detainees imprisoned at the Guantanimo military base in Cuba in 2006. This report was published by Mark Danner in the London Review of Books.

Third are the 4 Department of Justice legal briefs (‘torture memos’) which basically say “..do what you like, just don’t induce major organ failure, or worse, kill them.” They came to light as a result of an American Civil Liberties Union Freedom of Information Act request. These are the 4 memos that 5 ex-directors of the CIA, Leon Panetta included, have tried to stop being published. US President B H Obama went ahead and permitted them to be published anyway. Very few people took the trouble to read them. They are available on the ACLU website.

Last is the report of the Inspector General of the CIA May 7 2004, available in heavily redacted form. Eric Holder, the incoming Attorney General in the Obama administration, was said to have been sickened when he read the full version. He has reportedly advocated widening the investigation chaired by John Durham which, at the time of writing is still in session, having been set up in 2008.

A bill to prevent contractors from doing ‘rape by instrumentality’ was prepared by US legislators but failed when it met with fierce resistance from the White House. ‘There are very strict federal and state statutes against this and we don’t want our people to be vulnerable to prosecution.’

US officials implicated in the US torture programme include former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales (counsel to the president and later attorney general), Jay Bybee (head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)), John Rizzo (acting CIA general counsel), David Addington (counsel to the vice president), William J. Haynes II (Department of Defense general counsel), and John Yoo (deputy assistant attorney general in the OLC).

Ceramic. Approximate height 100cm

Fallujah.

In July of 2010 amidst the furore arising from the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables release, a report was published which was perhaps of far greater importance than the private conversations of world diplomats. This was the report of an epidemiological study carried out by molecular bio-scientist Chris Busby, co-authored with Malak Hamdan and Entesar Ariabi, which passed largely without comment in Western media outlets.

The report charts a 12 fold increase of cancers in children under the age of 14 living in the city of Fallujah in Iraq, with a 4 fold increase of all other cancers also recorded. The report notes that infant mortality in Fallujah is 4 times greater than in neighbouring Jordan, and 8 times greater than in Kuwait. The report also notes that the types of cancer are similar to those experienced by the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki following their exposure to the ionizing radiation from the two atom bombs that destroyed their cities in 1945.

Fallujah was never under a mushroom cloud, but rather was attacked twice during 2004 with Anglo American ground troops and aerial bombardment and weaponry which included white phosphorous and depleted uranium rounds. The scene of some of the heaviest fighting and fiercest resistance to the occupation of Iraq, some 70% of Fallujah’s buildings were destroyed in the attacks.

According to a Sky News report dated Thursday May 29, 2008:

“Fatima Ahmed is three years old. Small and lifeless she barely moves, burdened by two heads on her tiny frame. Her mother says doctors have been unable to diagnose exactly what has caused Fatima’s condition. But her father Jassim, when asked who he held responsible for his daughter’s condition said: ‘It’s because of the war – it’s flagrant aggression they launched against us. What they dropped on Fallujah God knows.’”

Ceramic figures and tiles. Plywood core plinth. Overall height 340cms