White Lilies

Artist Statement: 

I’ve always been fascinated with the WWII era of history. WWII affected the entire world, and as a result there are millions of stories and experiences that came out of it. Stories of the home front have always been interesting to me, so that’s what I wanted to write about. With that in mind, I decided to do a story about a war widow. Similar to The Veil, we wanted to tell a story from a perspective that isn’t often considered. I feel like there are so few stories about war widows, maybe because it’s a really sad a topic, or maybe it’s because people are more interested in what was going on overseas. 

Whatever the case, we decided to focus on the effect the war had on those who stayed home. In the preliminary research I did for my elevator pitch, I came across this story:  
  

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/for-wwii-soldiers-widow-a-60-year-mystery-finally-solved/  

From this came the basis of our story, one part history, one part romance and one part mystery. We decided to use D-Day as a major event in our story, because it is such a well-known event, as well as being a turning point in the war. We used this link for a lot of our information on D-Day:   

http://www.army.mil/d-day/ 

We also wanted to have some kind of symbol that tied the whole story together, so we decided to use the white lilies to do just that. White lilies are a symbol of chastity and virtue, and they are also popular funeral flowers. In our story, they are a symbol of Molly’s fidelity to Charlie and are also used foreshadow his death.

Overall I really enjoyed this project. It allowed me to look into a part of history that genuinely interests me, and gave me the chance to tell a story that I think is beautiful and important. I gained a greater appreciation for history itself, and I also realized how much history remains untold. It’s amazing how many different memories and stories people have of one event. I used to be a little bit frustrated by that because I always wanted to know what the one REAL story was. While working on this project, I realized that there is more than one real story, in fact there are millions of real stories about history. Every story and experience is real to the person it belongs to, and that was a wonderful lesson I was able to learn while doing this project. 

~Brontë Campbell