Australian artists respond to the horror of the Western Front battlefields

Salient, a major exhibition conceived by Robert Linnegar, director of King Street Gallery, revolves around the group of artists, sculptors and plein air painters – including Sciberras, Harrie Fasher, Wendy Sharpe, Idris Murphy, Amanda Penrose Hart and Euan Macleod – who travelled together to the Western Front and created work based on their experiences. The show, which mirrors a 2015 exhibition and documentary based on a journey to Gallipoli, draws on the power of this artistic tradition. As the human cost of conflict is made both distant and omnipresent, drip-fed to us in morsels via social media and news feeds, it's a creative endeavour that feels newly relevant.

Harrie Fasher is a sculptor and former equestrian whose 2017 sculpture, The Last Charge, channels the violence and vulnerability of the October 1917 Battle of Beersheba. Fasher says that the horse – a creature that's been historically used as a monument to victory and gallantry – helps her tell a "human story." Fasher's great uncle, Major Alfred Lachlan Macpherson, survived World War One and was awarded medals for his bravery. But for the artist, travelling to the Western Front cemented an approach that's as concerned with fear and mortality as it is with heroic feats.

"[I found out] that my great uncle won his medals for making spur-of-the-moment decisions that made a real impact; but for every act of bravery that's been recognised, there are 50 that have gone unrecognised," says Fasher, speaking over the phone from a research trip in Mongolia. "Horses are renowned for glory but they're also intensely fragile and tell us something about the anguish of humans. I read about men listening to their horses screaming as they'd been shot. Humans can tamp down their pain, but horses haven't developed that emotional intelligence. It was so upsetting that men would get out of the trenches, risking their lives so they could put them out of their misery."

Fasher's Their screams penetrate (2017) re-imagines this proximity to death as a kind of memento mori. Ash, bone and mangled steel recall a fallen horse head, hinting at the way conquest crushes bodies and spirits. "Lately, the plight of Vietnam veterans has struck a chord with me, she says quietly. "The pain can be never-ending."

Euan Macleod, a one-time Archibald winner, is also interested in the ways in which the impact of war can reverberate through landscapes that are psychological as well as physical. In his light-filled Haberfield studio, the Christchurch-born artist rifles through a series of small studies made in situ. They're the basis for arresting, large-scale paintings haunted by shadowy figures that lurch through tunnels licked by fire — a reference to the cavernous underground spaces where the soldiers took shelter, under enemy trenches. The works recall an inner horror in the nightmarish spirit of German expressionists like Max Beckmann and Otto Dix.

"In the Somme, the killing was on such a huge, industrial scale and yet just over 20 years later it happened again – visiting the Western Front just made me really sad," he says. "A lot of this work is a metaphor for mental digging. What's really buried under these places? It's about the relationship between our emotional states and what we choose to repress."

For Macleod, who recently discovered that his great uncle was killed at the Battle of Flers, with the New Zealand rifle brigade, this process involves a reckoning with the dangers of imperialism. It also means addressing the ways in which our involvement in historic conflicts has shaped the world in which we live.

"When you have a personal connection to a place, it brings it home but when I read his letters, they were horrible – at night, they would go over and kill as many Germans as they could, and he seemed not to question any of that," he says, a sombre note creeping into his voice. "England thought they were the rulers of the world. In a way, after World War One they were smashed. Now America is doing the same old imperialist thing. Look at Trump and the dictators we're dealing with. If you don't learn from history, you repeat it."

It's about the relationship between our emotional states and what we choose to repress.

Euan Macleod

Amanda Penrose Hart agrees with Macleod's sentiment. But the acclaimed painter, whose own great uncle was shot in the field after surviving the fighting at Pozieres and Mouquet Farm, battles that claimed nearly 23,000 Australian casualties, believes that the myth that war is romantic has been debunked.

"A hundred years ago, boys thought they were trotting off for adventure from places like Tamworth and Mudgee for the other side of the world and had no idea what they were in for – now we're better informed," says Penrose Hart, with a wry smile. "My great uncle was only 21 and he'd only just moved from England to Brisbane. It was incredible to visit the spot where he'd been killed, in this massive field where now they grow potatoes on privately owned farmland. It's tragic to think that his life was cut short. The Western Front is a war grave, there's no shops, no apartments. It looks the same as it would have back then."

In Penrose Hart's painting Corbie (2017), a sky caked with storm clouds looms over a flat, olive-green field that crests endlessly into the horizon.

"I've tried to [portray] the vastness of the landscape," she says. The painting references earlier work by Streeton but also nods at the way time can refract perspective, rendering the task of grasping history impossible. "We still can't imagine what it would be like to be there," she trails off.

Brad Manera, senior curator of the ANZAC memorial, has the historian's uncanny ability to recount facts and figures. From an office papered with military maps and black-and-white photos, he talks about the holes the battles of the Western Front left in Australian society.

"It was five times bigger than Gallipoli and soldiers came back with limbs missing, with dreadful nightmares," he says. "There was a damaged generation. We understand this more clearly now."

Manera says women, who mostly served as nurses in field hospitals, also endured the suffering. "Mothers, sisters and wives had to wait months for letters to hear about whether soldiers were dead or wounded," he says. The story of the Western Front is also inseparable from the legacy of racism in Australia, one that was institutionalised by the White Australia Policy and erased the contribution of Indigenous and Chinese-Australian soldiers.

"Indigenous soldiers fought alongside white Australians," he says. "But one of the tragedies of war was everyone being equal within the Australian Imperial Force and coming back home to discover that all the old racist stuff was still there."

Sciberras says that making art about war also tells a story about the artists who've gone before you. Although the tragedy of war has always consumed artists, the most poignant reflections go beyond representations of graves or battle scenes. In his horrifying Black Paintings of the early 1820s, Francisco Goya recalls the bleakness of Napoleonic invasion in skeletal faces and a dun-brown palette. Virginia Woolf likens the wartime dance between life and death to a moth dying on a windowsill in her famous 1942 essay The Death of the Moth. For Sciberras, the line between beauty and violence, nationalistic visions and grim realities haunts the work Fireflies, Bullecourt (2017).

"In 1917, the correspondent Charles Bean wrote about fireflies in the dark, illuminated off miles of barbed wire, but the story behind it is that these were actually bullets having their way with the Australian soldiers," he says. "It's a magnificent, poetic image of a harrowing scene."

Salient: Contemporary Artists at the Western Front will be on view from October 22 to February 17 at the ANZAC Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney.