More about Printing Banners

VAD nurses in Ely.   A while ago I read  Vera Brittain's 

book about being a Voluntary Nurse in WW1.  It was such a  moving acount, I really wanted to do something which acknowledged the nurses who worked in the auxillary hospital in Ely.

Once again the excellent website  Ely and WW1  provided a wealth of information.  There are some photographs of nurses on the website but unfortunately they were too indistinct for me to be able to work from so I have created a sort of composite image of a nurse for this banner.

The names, however are real.  These women worked at the Ely hospital and by the time it closed in 1919 they had treated 1,117 patients.

 

I printed a few of these banners just in case one of the layers went wrong.

As I was printing I started saving scraps of stencils and printing them down on a piece of sheeting in a more expressive way.  This is the resulting cloth.  I have called it 'Remnant' because it is made from remnants of design from the very graphic banners and because the list of names we have of the nurses are traces or remnants of the information we have of these women's lives.