"Two Brothers' - Completed

This is the 'Two Brothers' Panel by Shonna Johnson / Ypres 2016 Team 

The original panel design as submitted.

The Finnegan Brothers, Thoughts of Home
My Granddad, Jimmy Finnegan volunteered in 1914 when he was 17 years old leaving his blacksmithing apprenticeship to join the Royal Irish Rifles. While serving on the front line, as a sniper, he got word that his brother, Jonny Finnegan, was billeted nearby. The two brothers managed to send messages to each other and arranged a time and place to meet on the reserve line. Both borrowed bicycles and remarkably meet up and spent a short precious time together before returning to their regiments and the job of war. The brothers would not meet again until several years later, at the end of the war, home in their beloved Edinburgh. Jonny returning from fighting on the front line & Jimmy liberated from a German prisoner of war camp.
I wanted to capture the essence of the brothers rendezvous, caught between the harsh reality of the war, death, despair and the ravaged landscape and their thoughts and chat of cherished family and friends many miles away back home in Edinburgh. The stunted trees represent the war torn landscape with the brothers greeting each other towards the centre of the panel and memories of home symbolized by crow-stepped gabled houses and the tall tenement buildings of Edinburgh, home to the Finnegan family.

As completed at Ypres 2016

Central Figures - made before the event.

Left hand (some of the elements I helped with)

Right hand - 'Edinburgh'

Against the central 'Field of Poppies' - some idea of how the installed panel may look...