Dazzle Camouflage Practice: Design and Devices

The aim of this research project is to present the 1914-18 War Dazzle Camouflage system, for protecting ships from submarine attack, as a design practice demonstrating the function of optical design devices. Previous exhibitions in the United Kingdom have included Dazzle Camouflage in reference to contemporaneous, modernist or contemporary art works and installations or within wider camouflage displays.

This cross-disciplinary research project combines design-based research methodologies with archival and literature research to offer a new analysis and understanding of the development of Dazzle camouflage, and the creative methods through which it was conceived, produced, tested and deployed.

Dazzle Camouflage was first applied to ships during WW1. It continues to attract public attention and excite imaginations. From 1919 onwards parallels have been drawn between Dazzle Painting’s quasi-technical, abstract designs and the spatial concepts in modernist artworks that characterise Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism. The assumption that modernist artworks were a major influence on the inception of Dazzle Camouflage is commonly made but cannot be substantiated. This assumption is at odds with the concept for Dazzle Camouflage, conceived by marine artist Norman Wilkinson, which was derived from maritime references. This creates an awkward disjuncture in an otherwise engaging narrative, where avant-garde meets establishment in the saving of ships, resources and lives. My research originates from this problematic and proposes that the stronger influence on the origin of Dazzle Painting was Norman Wilkinson’s exposure to modern shipping technologies, including camouflage, but in particular his exposure and observation (through drawing) of the mass destruction of shipping following the German declaration of Unrestricted Submarine Warfare.

The study of archives at Duxford, Imperial War Museum, The National Archives and original family material left by the inventor of Dazzle, Norman Wilkinson, along with contemporary and contemporaneous literature, both extend knowledge and the contexts in which this radical, optical art form of deceptive camouflage was developed.

The work extends and challenges existing interpretations which emphasise its context within futurist art practices, with a new study of Norman Wilkinson’s work as a war artist in World War 1, recording the huge losses of merchant shipping during. It explores the existence and use of ‘sinking ship’ motif, that sought not to hide the ship, but to confuse the submariner’s perception as to the condition, type, direction and trajectory of the vessel for long enough for them to fail to accurately predict progress and fire successfully.

The use of drawing as an analytical and communication tool for this research traces and re-traces the design and devices developed for the 800 designs developed for merchant and some naval shipping over the final eighteen months of the war.