Michael Sandle, born (1936) and brought up on the Isle of Man, is best known as a sculptor but spent most of his time whilst a student at the Slade in the etching and lithography studios. In a statement made in 1988 he averred that printmaking was a seminal activity for him, which significantly affected his development as an artist, particularly the way he continued to draw and he confessed to sometimes having a longing to make prints.

After a period of working in the USA and Canada, he has spent much of his professional life in Germany at the Academy of Art at Karlsruhe. His work addresses the brutality of war, and his representation of weaponry, machinery and its other accoutrements has been influenced by the early 20th-century Italian Futurist artists. Much of his work has a memorial theme, looking back to various periods of intense international and global conflict. Here, a band of bullet-headed soldiers, led by the figure of Death, protect their barricade with guns, surrounded by a ravaged landscape.