Preparing the Exhibition Proposal

The following represents my thought processes that led me to the idea of siting my Degree show in a fictitious World War 2 bunker.
My practice over the past three years has to a greater or lesser extent been dominated by three themes, primarily landscape with history, both personal and national being a major contributor and finally conflict or discord. Therefore it seemed right to set my final exhibition in a bunker and one of the Atlantic Wall fortifications seemed appropriate because the Atlantic Wall was constructed by the Nazis using slave labour to stop any attempt by the Allies at liberating Europe.
The first group of pictures below are a  mixture of my own photos and Google search results.

This picture is of a 'Verdun ' Type bunker. There is an online community of Bunker explorers and spotters that is very well developed and because of the web very international
Below is an sculpture called called Bunker/mule that I found while researching the Atlantic Wall and typifies what I want to do with my fictitious exhibition that is to repurposed a structure that was intend to ensure the power and dominion of Nazi Germany over Europe to something creative and even humorous or kind, I think Bill Woodrow's 1995 work, Bunker Mule,  located at Blavand beach that added Mules heads and tails to Atlantic wall bunkers on the coast of Denmark,  achieves this very effectively.

 By Bill Woodrow - Own work; photographed by Matthias Süßen on 22 July 2012, 10:11:43 (according to Exif data)., CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20676136

Ged Quinn also successfully carries this subversion out by creating bunkers from cakes, and painting them almost as still lifes. I would like to thank Zoe Mendelson for bringing Quinn's work in this area to my attention.

This picture and the one below were both taken by me on the Island of Schiemonikoog off the Dutch coast and these bunkers were part of a large network of bunkers and other structures that supported two powerful Radar antenna sited on the Island.

Some of these images shaped what I did in Stage 2, pictured below.

When we were asked to produce an exhibition proposal that suited our work, but could be based in our imagination I settled on the idea of an exhibition in a beach side bunker and decided to build a diorama. See below for pictures of the process.

The completed work will be in my submitted proposal.