ART THERAPY: Former Communications Marine Processes Combat Memories by Weaving with Concertina Wire, Stenciling Messages in Blood on Concrete

The scene evokes a bombed out bunker. Hanging from the ceiling, nine chunks of concrete, each embedded with a grenade, cast pareidolic shadows. One looks like an anatomical heart hanging in a square. Ambient sunlight pours in, glowing off the glazed wood floor under precisely positioned track lighting. A wooden chair hangs in the balance near the windows opposite. This is “The Hydra” projecting against an interior wall in a small Mass Art gallery, installed by former communications Marine Nate Heilman.

“If the grenades drop, the chair can be pulled up and over the wires and be reduced to ash,” Nate says. “Or, it can be lowered to the ground. A child could use it to sit at a desk to learn.”

The scene suggests how the U.S. military interacts with the youth of the world at this moment will shape future news stories. “If we focus all of our time and energy on the real issue — on the children — as opposed to all of these secondary and tertiary events that are happening, then we could eliminate some of the issues we’re seeing.”

The square, triangle, and circle drawn in ash on the wall represent the shapes children use to learn dexterity. “You put the circle peg in the circle hole, the square peg in the square hole,” Nate said. “Each of the grenades has a line running up and above and over to the opposing wall. The wires attached to the pins are the counterbalance holding up a burnt child’s chair suspended in space.”

“Art shows, it’s the same thing as watching the news. It’s been very closely curated. The conversations that they want to have in those spaces are very specific and veterans are a minority in that world,” Nate said. “People are curious. It’s like what’s this new animal introduced to the zoo?”

Blood stenciled on a white canvas by the entrance to the gallery reads, “Thank You for Your Service.” As a Marine, Nate always wanted to be called by his first name. Now he can be. Publishing artworks in progress alongside family pictures @Nate.Actual on Instagram, Nate curates his handle through the prism of his experiences as a unit leader.

“I miss the hands-on stuff that I would do in the Marine Corps, and I don’t get challenged in that way anymore in my life,” He says. To honor the experiences of his brothers and sisters in the military, he says he works hard to create meaningful conversations using difficult materials.

“I did it in blood, especially human blood, Veteran blood,” Nate said. “If we’re going to have a conversation about warfare, if we’re going to have a conversation about what the service is, it needs to be surprising.”

Another stencil of blood, “Complacency Kills” appears on a partial concrete barrier in the corner. The barrier is cast concrete with rebar. Zachary, a Force Recon Marine, donated blood for the letters.

“Whatever base you’re on, if you’re going on patrol or convoy, there are signs that say Complacency Kills. It’s a reminder that you could be killed at any moment.”

“What does it mean when you come back from those situations? Say you’re 19 years old and you’re constantly being bombarded with mortar fire or you’re in firefights. The threat to your life is very real and you come to grips with your own mortality. You recognize and understand death in a way that most people don’t until they’re at the end of their lives and then you return to the United States where that threat doesn’t exist in the same way. You can’t really shake that,” Nate says.

If you step back on one side of the exhibit and look at the suspended grenades and ashen shapes on your left and the suspended chair on the right, they both exist in your periphery. It is easy to do nothing, Nate says. “Most of us exist in the periphery. We watch a sanitized version of these things happening through the screens on our phones or through television.”

When media offers up a threat — impending warfare, a school shooting, the collapse of the stock market — we watch it through screens, our televisions and smart-phones. “The screen is literally a box and what we see is further mediated so we can stomach whatever has just happened. We hear about a school shooting, but we don’t see bloody, dead children. Whatever the threat is, we put it into these boxes to reduce our anxiety about it and continue on with our day.”

Hanging Chair

A chair hangs from the ceiling, attached to nine wires that run through a pulley system. The weight of the chair is balanced against grenades set in concrete hanging along the opposite wall.

the hydra

Dangling in front of one wall, wires separate like the nine necks of the Hydra, attaching to the pins of nine grenades mostly hidden in chunks of cement, hanging within boxes drawn with ash.

complacency kills

Text on the barrier, “Complacency Kills” is written in the blood of a Reconnaissance Marine.

coiled barbed wire

The coil of barbed wire sends loopy shadows across the stained wood floor. Lights arranged with care make a clock like circle, and bit of rebar sticking out of the wall looks like an hour hand.

tifl

Between the charred chair hanging at a blast off angle, and the wall of grenades, a post stands at about the height of a toddler, and it’s wearing a Soviet era child’s gas mask.

1400 feet of barbed wire, 100 feet for each year of Nate’s service sit coiled off from the center of the room. “I would move it around in the gallery every day to show that through all of my personal experiences I was galvanized like the steel is, but you still have to be able to manipulate yourself whether you’re traveling in Afghanistan or Iraq or you’re back home. You have to be able to change who you are mentally and physically to fit into those spaces.”

“Barbed wire is a particularly tedious medium because it wraps around you as you work with it,” Nate says. “It’s humbling. It always wants to go back to the shape that it was made to be in. I’m trying to manipulate it into something that it’s not ready to be and doesn’t want to be and I think that also speaks a lot to the Veteran experience.”

The first time Nate used barbed wire for art, he says he worked until 4am. Washing his hands, he saw the puncture holes created streaming blood. “The authenticity of the materials we use matters,” He says.

“There’s something that’s told through barbed wire that can’t be told through another medium. Barbed wire fights back when you’re working with it, which is something I really enjoy.”

“You have a 17 or 18-year-old kid going into the service and they’re manipulated and changed, molded into the person that they need to be in order to fulfill their capacity in the service. A lot of times there’s backlash. They fight that process and that’s great because they figure out who they are in that struggle, in their role in the military, and the military understands how they fit into that puzzle.”

This centerpiece of the exhibit is called Tifl. It’s simple. A short post made of concrete, burnt wood and barbed wire stands about the height of a toddler with a child’s size gas mask pulled over its top.

“Tifl is the Arabic word for ‘child.’ I think it literally means squishy, or not hardened,” Nate said. “As I made Tifl, I kept it in my living room, where I interact with my daughter, and forced myself to look at it every day. In the process of making it I imagined what it would be like for my daughter to be growing up in a place where it is necessary to have a gas mask fitted annually.”

“There are countries where every year, just as we bring our kids for shots, parents bring their kids to get gas masks fitted in the event of an attack. My daughter is concerned about whether or not I leave her bunny in her backpack for when she’s at school (even though she’s not allowed to have toys when she’s at school). Some children bring their gas masks to school or must know where they are kept in their home,” Nate said. “As much as we complain about the politics and the policies that we live under, we really have it good. I think it’s important that we understand how the rest of our human brothers and sisters are doing, and maybe we can do something better for each other.”

“Back home, you know and understand death in a very different way and you have to exist and live out the rest of your life understanding that, knowing that. You become complacent and it kills your opportunity to live life in the same way that everybody else does. You’re doing things differently. You’re understanding the world around you differently.”

“My daughter was born on the day I left for Afghanistan. I hadn’t even seen her in person, just pictures, but being in Afghanistan and seeing children and their interaction with their world and me and what life means in these different countries, I realized that even if I had died there in Afghanistan my daughter would have a better life by having been born in the United States.”

During a transport flight once in Afghanistan, the landing gear failed. Nate remembers contemplating his imminent death for several hours. The experience was so excruciating that one person on the plane threatened suicide. “We were burning fuel,” Says Nate. “We were going to have to crash land this plane and I was thinking that I had to say goodbye to my daughter who I hadn’t seen yet, and I still knew that she was going to be afforded a better life than some of these other children.”

“That experience changed how I view my time with my daughter. Even without the direct threat to my life I still would have come back and known that my interactions with her were changed, altered for the better because of having seen how parents and children in these other places have to deal with their situation.”

Follow Nate’s life and see his artworks on Instagram @nate.actual