• Age 6 when the Occupation of Jersey first started
• Lived on the east coast of Jersey which allowed her to have a view of the French Coast
• When the occupation first started she heard the original bombing which took place in France, before the Germans came over to Jersey
• She and her five year old neighbour used to play on the roads around their houses, watching the planes fly around the outcast of France and above them in Gorey, flying towards St.Helier (Victoria Avenue)
• It was heard that bombing were taking place on Victoria Avenue which is in the parish of St.Helier/ St.Lawrence of Jersey.
• Mothers moved the children from the street to be undercover in bushes which allowed them to be protected from the sight of planes when the bombings took place in the middle of the island.
• She explained the bombings to be very loud although she spent most of that night looking at the starts in the sky which stood out due to the ash. It was said that she also found looking at the stars very relaxing.
• The Germans overtook Jersey and set up base on the highest point of Jersey which is known as Les Plutons. They used this part to shoot over at France as the height gave them a clear shot.
• Once the Germans overtook, rules were introduced.
• The first was that households had to put up white sheets outside their houses to show the Germans that they could enter.
• Secondly, that each family had to have a ration booklet. The booklet contained removable stamps which were used to purchase the essential food items such as sugar, cooking oil, canned goods and meats.
• The family lent their ration booklet to someone and they never gave it back due to having a massive shortage of food.
• Due to living next to a farm, Joan’s mother wrote her occupation as being a farmer which allowed her to get more o the essential items, and it was believable because of the location they lived in. Making them lucky.
• Thirdly, the Germans then introduced a curfew for the people who lived in the military zone. The times for these being 9pm in the winter and 10pm in the summer, and you weren’t allowed back outside until 6am.
• Black outs were also introduced where every house had to black out their windows with cardboard in order to not let any light outside the house. Street lamps were also turned off making pure darkness.
• Lastly, a German currency was introduced called ‘Marks and Pfennig’, the amount each person got was up to the original amount they had in English.
• A typical substitute for tea and coffee during these time was parsnips browned on the stove and mixed with boiling water.
• For farmers who originally grew crops for a living, there was a restriction on how much they could grow in the war and it was kept an eye on by the germans to ensure the rules were followed.
• Joan’s family would go and collect the remains of the corn left over from August’s harvest and stash it in their apron sacs without the Germans seeing. The corn would allow them to take it to the mill or hide the corn
• The overall 95% of Jersey Channel Islands followed the rules and got on with the Germans, it was only if you were to mistreat the Germans and not follow rules that there would be a serious problem.

Stenram deliberately focuses on the lower body or arms while removing the reciprocal gaze from the subject by veiling the head and torso. Through the impossibility of eye contact we are free to leer, unmediated as voyeurs. We can survey the details in each image unencumbered by conscious relations or responsibility to the other, thereby objectifying the body and the potential for fetishism. Simple graphic and inanimate hands, feet, ankles become more tantalising when isolated for examination.

Vintage, pin-up photos are the inspiration and direct material for the series, the title of which, Drape, interprets the work in relation to the subjects in the images – the women who literally drape themselves around the set but also in terms of the curtains that conceal them. All of the images are subtle,black and white interiors shot in a similar style with each woman, or so we assume, positioned in front of a window. The artist’s intervention in the image is to extend the curtains to conceal the head and torso. The images remind me in someway of certain works by Louise Bourgeois, namely the disaggregation of body parts, controlling the material and the information that is exposed. They especially recall her drawings where she would combine half woman-half house, a birdcage with legs and so on.

Born in Sweden, Eva Stenram studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited internationally, including shows at the V&A Museum, Zendai Museum of Modern Art (China), Museum of Contemporary Art Teipei (Taiwan), Seoul Museum of Art (South Korea) and Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (India). Her work has featured in several magazines including Architectural Review, Blueprint, Source, Succour and The New Statesman. Eva Stenram worked as a lecturer in Fine Art, Photography and Video Art at the University of Bedfordshire from 2006-2010 and has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Creative Arts, Derby University, Glasgow School of Art, Southampton Institute and the Arts Institute at Bournemouth.

On Monday we took a visit to the Jersey Archive which is the islands national repository holding archival material from public institutions as well as private businesses. The Jersey archive is used for information on multiple information sources for example, people often go to the Archive to find out about :

Family history is one of the most popular reasons people visit and go into the archive. The archive allows people to find and research into previous family members that they might not have met. It allows the public to go on a discovery through their past and find out about ancestors not only that but about their lives, their personalities and values. There is an extensive collection of books, family trees, letters to and from loved ones, indexes of baptism, marriages and deaths but also valuable ornaments and pictures that are all carefully and delicately looked after.

Jersey Heritage is delighted that the Channel Island history is collected and kept safely at the Jersey Archive. The Jersey archives have people working there with experience of over 30 years who are more than willing to help members of the public re-discover grey areas in their backgrounds. For people that may have not been living here for long it is a good place to start when trying to begin a family tree. The archive also holds a collection of occupation registration cards aswell. These cards are valuable as they contain invaluable information on your ancestors. The entire civilisation of Jersey had to have one of those cards unless they were foreign which meant they would be given another form of registration card called an Alien card which was often blue. The archive holds over 31,000 registration cards of people that lived on the island during the time Jersey had been occupied. Each card contained information like the persons address, name, date and place of birth, maiden name and their current occupation. The card also has a passport sized photo on it in black and white. The archive also has military records, criminal records, education records which tend to be the next most popular pieces of information people want to find out. Records such as the first world war roll of honour and rolls of service can give people more information into what they might be looking for. Some peoples anscetors might have appeared in court, sent to prison or even deported from the island, finding out details of their offences like that can sometimes piece someones knowledge of a certain individual. The archive also holds many police records, court documents and prison registers that can be used to find out if any of our ancestors are criminals. The online catalogue of the Jersey Heritage page holds over 200,000 document that are held as hard copies at the Jersey archives.

Below is an example of a registration card:

I selected her name at random due to me not having family over in Jersey during the time it was occupied. This is because I was born in Madeira so most of my family if not all of my family lived there apart from the odd one or two that moved to the UK. However, when I was at the archive I did search for people that had my surname and middle name, although not being successful with my second name Da silva I did find a couple of Abreu’s. I did confirm with my mum later on that evening that we didn’t have any family In Jersey during the occupation and during the war but not soon after it ended my family members began to move across.