CORRESPONDENCE

Having nice time. Just off to sit on sea front. Been and booked for two shows this morning. Weather very warm, see you I hope next Sunday 6.25pm.

Correspondence is a process of collecting, archiving and researching tourist postcards from the late 1960s onward, which are re-photographed out of season. Central to the project is the appropriation of both image and text: each work adopts the original sender’s words as its title, relocating everyday messages into a new context. The project juxtaposes saturated, idealised imagery from late-20th-century culture with deadpan contemporary views, exposing a disjunction between remembered pleasure and present mundanity. By exhibiting original postcards alongside new photographs and producing new take-away postcards, the work establishes a cyclical exchange in which images and words are repeatedly re-authored. Postcards function as cultural readymades—mass-produced yet haunted by pre-ownership—enabling the appropriation of memory as media. The project foregrounds temporality, cultural change and mortality, questioning what remains of the people and experiences embedded in these commonplace artefacts. The act of reworking these objects is a conversation (a correspondence) with the past.


2007 - present

This is were we go in the water you would love it the sun shines all day, hope you are feeling better.

Having a lovely holiday. Weather being kind. Hope your new pal is getting on ok. Pippa is enjoying herself.

Having a mixed bag of weather but not worrying. Just returned from Plymouth they’re more shops there than the whole of Croydon & Bromley put together. Amazing the number of people on holiday. The “Tamar” is a fascinating bridge crossed all too quickly.

We are having a most enjoyable week. We went to Helford Passage & visited Emmie at Manaccan. She is very well apart from the arthritis. We have been lucky with the weather, rather breezy some days but no rain.

Now this is what I call work – sun sea sand a bit of cooking & washing up & keeping an eye on a v. well behaved 6yr old girl. This place is absolute heaven. The cottage we’re in is just opposite the Y.H. here and just to the right of the bench –about 20 metres in from the cliff edge and a minute to the beach!

My name is Jill Barratt, I live at 2c Cannon Hill Lane, Merton Park, London S.W.20 9.E.P Hope you like this scene of Newquay in Cornwall.

I am enjoying every minute of our holiday & am a good girl. We have had lots of sunshine but today is cloudy. We went to Lyme Regis on Monday.

I’ve been here today remember this view on card and we didn’t loose car. Margaret came with us weather not all that good but no rain.

We thought you would like to know that we found our way to the little church & were appreciative of what we saw. Thank you for telling us & we wish you well at Perranporth which in spite of the bad weather we liked. Let us hope it will be a good day when you move on thursday.

Correspondence installation at Territorial exhibition installation at The CASS Bank Space Gallery, London Metropolitan University, 2016