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 There is no blood or mangled bodies. Instead there are pink
dolls and blue tanks. A bird from a video game represents bombs
falling from the sky. An elephant symbolizes a lost sibling.
McCarty's most recent work was set in Mosul where thousands of
civilians where caught up in the fight to oust Islamic State.
Social workers say children who witnessed the violence will
suffer trauma for years.
He uses art-therapy drawings and interviews with the children to
depict their accounts using toys.
"I harness that to tell their stories and give it to an audience
that normally maybe wouldn’t look," said McCarty, 43.
The children draw the horror, the loss, and the harm they
suffered. Often, their accounts are presented with symbols which
McCarty then recreates with toys. The result is a mix of the
realistic and the absurd, with a hint of pop culture.
McCarty describes it as "reality with a dose of sugar".
"It is from that childhood innocence, that very pure place of
telling the story but not telling the story, and that is what is
so powerful," he said.
"People will connect to this. Especially for Western audiences
where it is so easy to cast people in war zones ... as 'the
others'," McCarty said in an interview in Beirut.
"It gets past that because these are just toys. They are just
plastic totems of real people."
A boy taking part in one session near Mosul in May drew an adult
elephant with two calves. While he colored in the parent and one
of the calves, he refused to color in the second which he said
represented his dead sibling.
In his recreation, McCarty placed a toy elephant in a pool of
dirty water standing behind a calf. He then superimposed a faded
image of the second calf to represent the dead sibling.
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"ONE STEP FROM REALITY"
A recurring image in the children's drawings is the yellow "Angry
Bird", a deadly character in a popular video game. For the children,
it came to represent bombs. McCarty said it was "just one step from
the reality".
A girl who witnessed Islamic State militants stone a woman to death
depicted the scene by drawing the shape of a woman only to bury her
with circles until she was barely visible.
McCarty's depicted that with a doll dressed in a headscarf and robe
being pelted with stones. A shadow of a man in the foreground
represents her executioner.
McCarty said the process of visualizing the drawings takes days.
Once he has chosen an image and found the toys to recreate it, his
work on the ground has sometimes put him danger.
On his first visit to Mosul in 2017, McCarty said Islamic State
snipers tried to shoot him twice as he arranged a toy tank on the
ground near a destroyed car.
His last visit to Mosul was in May.
"I did this entire set up in the old city, the smell of death
everywhere. When we were done we realized there was a skull and a
body a meter away, the beard still intact."
"I did this toy photo next to a dead ISIS fighter still in the
rubble. That is the weird, bizarre ... reality of the project."
McCarty said the initial motivation for his work came from his
father, a Vietnam war veteran who rarely spoke about the war. His
work, which began in 1996 in Croatia, has also taken him to Gaza,
Lebanon and Iraq.
"I went into this project from a very academic, artistic point of
view and all of that of went out the window when I saw a little girl
coloring pools of blood for the first time."
(Reporting by Ayat Basma and Imad Creidi; Editing by Tom Perry and
Matthew Mpoke Bigg)
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