Paul Rooney – Broken Token

Experience a two-screen film by artist Paul Rooney which explores the idea of home during times of conflict.

‘Broken Token’ has involved Plymouth veterans, creatives and West Country folk singer Hannah Martin.

A single female voice sings a folk ballad, inspired by a page found in a Victorian folk song collector’s manuscript from The Box’s archives. She sings of waiting in her garden for her ‘dark-eyed sailor’ to return from war, bearing the other half of her broken token, a gimmel ring.

As she waits, three veterans pass, and she asks them: ‘When you were fighting in distant lands, did you think of the home you left?’ In reply to this, the veterans tell of their experiences connecting with home during the Falklands War, Gulf War and War in Afghanistan.

Film footage of suburban garden gates in Plymouth accompanies the sound, revealing, in their individuality, the quiet unpredictability of the ordinary. The garden images represent ‘home’, but also stand in for a more general possibility of redemption, of the potential of the past to return, changed, to renew the present: ‘Each moment of time is a garden gate,’ the song goes, ‘Through it my love may walk.’